The CBI Is Worth Saving

Last year, I did something that most sports fans have not. I attended a College Basketball Invitational game. I don't say that to be elitist. It is just a fact. Nobody attends these games. Last year, attendance peaked at 832 for the first round. It must have been a summation of day's attendance across the four games. There could not have been more than 400 fans at Army's game with Elon.

Some may look at tournaments like the CBI as a mockery due to the low attendance and generally mediocre teams that participate in it. However, the CBI still had value to the college basketball world.

Being an Army men's basketball fan is a disconsolate existence. The Never Made the Tourney Club on Twitter/X often mentions the fact that Army, Citadel, and William & Mary are the only three programs who have been eligible for the NCAA Tournament since its inception but have never made it. There have hardly been many close calls since Mike Krzyzewski left for Duke in 1980.

Naturally, unique regular season multi-team events have avoided Army. Over the last decade, while other mid-majors got to play in Cancun, The Bahamas, The U.S. Virgin Islands, and even Daytona Beach, the Black Knights got to compete for the spoils of the Metro NY/NJ Classic, the Fairleigh Dickinson Basketball Classic, and the Brown Bears Tip-Off Classic. There are few moments of sunshine for Army men's basketball.

That changed last year when Army announced its participation in the CBI after a rare winning season. The Black Knights ultimately did not win the coveted title but accomplished something not even Coach K's teams could even accomplish: win a postseason tournament game. In front of hundreds in a quiet Daytona Beach auditorium, Army won its first postseason game since 1970. It may not seem like much, but it might as well have been a run to the Final Four for a long-suffering fanbase.

Chicago State fans could relate to the elation of Army fans. The Cougars' path to the 2024 CBI may have been more arduous than Army's. The program bounced from the Great West, where they did not even have an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, to the ill-fitting and dying Western Athletic Conference, to independence. Along the way, the university somehow survived a serious existential crisis. The Cougars clawed to a 12-18 record with three wins against non-division schools, playing in front of home crowds fewer than 100 people on multiple occasions. Try telling this school the CBI did not matter.

The increased corporatization of college sports, particularly revenue sports has created a landscape that discourages attention to less lucrative things. The NCAA Tournament has earned a more expansive place in the sports landscape not because it has gotten better, but because fans do not have to think to hard to enjoy it. There is no need for a viewer to convince themselves to watch a 12-18 or 14-18 team play for a trophy.

Fans letting TV networks tell them what does or does not have value has become detrimental to college basketball and college sports as a whole. The CBI is a victim of this for at least year.

This is not to say the CBI's model was not flawed. The $27,500 entry fee is questionable and even more difficult to justify in the NIL era. Schools only received valuable exposure if they reached the semifinals on ESPNU and ESPN2 due to Flosports streaming the earlier rounds. The writing was on the wall in 2024 when they could not field a full, 16-team field and instead had 15 teams compete. The following year, that dwindled to 11.

Nevertheless, no one forced the schools to pay the $27,500 fee. Every school that came down to Daytona Beach found value in the CBI. The tournament constantly advertised itself as a launchpad for programs who took the next step to make the NCAA Tournament the following year. Now, this valuable experience is gone.

Long-suffering programs in the shadows of the vast 365-team Division I landscape had a reason to find joy through the CBI. Now, with the NIT and College Basketball Crown trying to showcase name brands, these opportunities are fewer and far between. College sports benefits little from more miserable fanbases.

The CBI may not have mattered to the TV executives and high-major conference commissioners, but to many fanbases it was a point of pride. One that may never come back.

The Army Men’s Basketball Media Guide aided my research of recent Army MTEs. You can read it here.