Is the Maui Invitational in trouble?
The famed college basketball tournament had its weakest field in years, if not decades, in 2025. It could sadly be a sign of things to come
As the final seconds ticked off the clock Wednesday and USC beat Arizona State 88-75 to win the 2025 Maui Invitational, every little detail about the moment felt wrong.
For one, the title game of the most revered multi-team event in men’s college basketball – once a staple of the night before Thanksgiving – tipped off at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time, or 8:30 a.m. where the contest was actually taking place. Two teams that once shared a league but no longer do for baffling and depressing reasons faced off in a non-conference matchup. There were pockets of empty seats in a venue with a capacity of only 2,400. As the Trojans dribbled out the clock, the TV cameras only picked up faint applause, with Chad Baker-Mazara, early in his 74th season of college eligibility, needing to pump up the crowd, as if to remind them that, hey, this is a pretty big deal.
It’s hard to blame them for not thinking it was.
The Maui Invitational, the cornerstone of college basketball’s “Feast Week” and the sport’s marquee November tournament, was decidedly lacking in pizazz this season. One year after hosting four ranked teams in the eight-team field – a group that most notably included UConn, North Carolina and Michigan State – Maui had just one ranked team in this year’s tournament – and even that team, NC State, was barely hanging in the rankings, at No. 23 in the Associated Press poll.
That figure only tells so much of the story. Only one of the seven other teams, USC, was even receiving votes in the latest AP poll. The day of the tournament’s first game, three of Maui’s seven Division I teams (Division II Chaminade was in the event this year) were outside of the top 80 on KenPom, with only two teams, NC State and USC, in the top 40 of the sport’s most trusted rankings.
It wasn’t always this way.
Just last year, there were four ranked teams in the field, all of which were in the top 12 and three of which were in the top five. In each of the two years before that, there were five ranked squads in the event. In the past 22 iterations of Maui, going back to 2004, this year marks only the third time there have been fewer than two ranked teams in the tournament at the time it tipped off. It’s a lack of starpower that’s glaring.
This is far from the first turbulent stretch in Maui’s history.
Shortly after the Battle 4 Atlantis debuted in 2011, it immediately began ripping away some of the programs that would have normally gone to Maui, enticing them with the same kinds of tropical trappings, but with much shorter and cheaper flights. In 2012, in Atlantis’ second season of existence, Maui, like this year, had just one ranked team. The event rebounded, though, having at least three ranked teams in the field in five of the next six years.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the tournament was held away from Hawaii, in Asheville, N.C. in 2020 and Las Vegas in 2021. In 2023, three months after Maui was ravaged by wildfires, the event was moved to O’ahu. For all that Maui, both the event and the physical place, had endured, its 2024 edition was one of its best in recent memory, with two teams that would make it all the way to the Elite Eight that season.
The threat it faces now, though, is likely its most daunting yet.
Last year marked the inaugural Players Era Festival, a multi-team event in Las Vegas that paid participating teams $1 million apiece. This year, fueled by private equity and sponsorship dollars, event organizers have committed more than $20 million in participation and prize money.
What was an eight-team tournament last year swelled to 18 teams this season, eight of which were ranked – No. 3 Houston, No. 7 Michigan, No. 8 Alabama, No. 12 Gonzaga, No. 14 St. John’s, No. 15 Iowa State, No. 17 Tennessee and No. 21 Auburn.
It’s likely not just a one-year occurrence, either. The event’s field is littered with historical and contemporary powerhouses. Ten of the Players Era participants have reached the Final Four in the past decade while seven have at least one national championship to their name. The understanding for many of these programs is that they’ll participate in the tournament annually, so long as there’s mutual interest. With a guaranteed seven-figure payday, it’s hard to blame them. It has a direct effect on Maui, too. Three programs that were originally announced as part of the 2025 Maui field 18 months ago – Baylor, Oregon and UNLV – backed out and enlisted in Players Era instead.
Players Era is only going to get bigger, too – both literally and in terms of cachet. Next year, the event is planning on expanding to 32 teams. Among those new additions will be Louisville and Florida – current top-10 teams with a national championship in the past 15 years – along with a Virginia program that’s seemingly on the rise under first-year head coach Ryan Odom (and that also has a national title this century).
Players Era’s rise is impossible to separate from Maui’s demise, even if both are only temporary fluctuations.
There’s reason to believe this is more than just a blip. As colleges start to engage in revenue-sharing with their athletes following the House settlement, schools are searching more frantically than ever for extra sources of income to pay their players and build rosters capable of competing for championships.
Maui was once a recruiting pitch and, through a less cynical lens, a positive life experience for players, many of whom had never previously been to Hawaii or, depending on their backgrounds, ever thought a trip there to be possible.
Now, when more lucrative opportunities exist elsewhere, some of Maui’s inherent setbacks that it had been able to brush off for decades have loomed larger. The trip itself is expensive, with schools often shelling out six figures for flights and other costs. Body clocks are thrown off, too, with teams spending close to a week as many as six hours behind what they’re accustomed to and tasked with reacclimating once they get back. For teams that compete in Maui, tryptophan is hardly the only thing making them sluggish in the days after Thanksgiving.
When another event can promise none of those logistical, physical and financial headaches and also guarantee them a fat check for coming to play games against top competition, things can get dicey.
“Maui’s gonna die, just because everyone needs money and we’re doing anything we can to get it to pay players,” an unnamed coach at a top-10 program said to CBS Sports. “We’re playing exhibition games to make money. The single, soul-driving factor in all of this is: How can I get extra money?”
It’s not just Maui being affected, either.
Atlantis, once its primary competitor, also had a watered-down field this season, with Virginia Tech, Saint Mary’s, Vanderbilt, South Florida, VCU, Colorado State, Western Kentucky and Wichita State. Only one of those teams – Vanderbilt, at No. 24 – was ranked. Like Maui, it saw one of its originally scheduled participants (Auburn) bounce for Players Era. According to CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander, Atlantis has no teams signed up for next season’s event.
The thought of Maui vanishing entirely is unthinkable for anyone who follows college basketball reasonably closely. The tournament has been around since 1984 and has been a launching pad of sorts for some of the greatest teams and most memorable players of the past 40 years in the sport. Even things as ostensibly trivial as the mural behind one of the baskets in the Lahaina Civic Center are etched in the minds of millions of college basketball fans.
Still, the sport has seen ballyhooed events that were pillars of the early season calendar disappear before. Just look at the Great Alaska Shootout, which ceased operations as a men’s tournament in 2017.
That doesn’t mean Maui has to suffer the same fate. The event has emotional and brand equity. To most college basketball fans, it will always mean something. While it may have been caught off guard by Players Era’s ascent, it can potentially seek outside investors and additional big-moneyed sponsors to at least compete with its deep-pocketed adversary.
“I would say that would be up to the organizers and the event and the promoters to see if they can do whatever the the Players Era is doing,” Kansas coach Bill Self said in a press conference earlier this month. “I don’t think they’re in danger unless maybe they don’t make some adjustments.”
For as many waves as it has made the past two years, there’s still skepticism about the long-term viability of Players Era, especially since multi-team events generally aren’t huge money-makers for the people and companies that stage them. Though it’s nearly impossible to predict what rosters will look like, next year’s Maui field doesn’t look nearly as bleak as this year’s did, with Arizona, BYU, Ole Miss and Washington among those who will take part.
If this year truly is a warning sign that Maui is in grave danger, though, it’s worth remembering what will be lost. There’s tradition. There’s a community that has embraced the event, benefitted economically from it and done everything it can, even through pandemics and natural disasters, to make sure it was held. But more than that, there’s the idea that college basketball will have lost part of its soul.
There’s little, if anything, like Maui in major college sports. Marquee programs led by big-name coaches travel halfway across an ocean to play in a high-school-sized gym that’s almost always packed with fans living and dying with every possession, with that undistilled energy coming through to millions of viewers across the country. It’s something that Players Era, even with its NIL promises, can’t come close to matching, with the sterile, half-filled Las Vegas arenas this week standing as proof.
Hopefully, Wednesday’s underwhelming title-game scene and this year’s weak field will be an anomaly. Much like it did after Atlantis joined the November basketball scene about 15 years ago, it will adjust, continue to sign major programs and pieces like this will seem needlessly fatalistic in five years. Maui, like it always has, could very well find a way to continue to survive.
For the sake of college basketball’s health, it better.
What I’m looking forward to most in Week 14
Ohio State can’t lose again to Michigan, can it? Of course, it’s possible, as the Wolverines have shown each of the past four years, marking their longest win streak in the famed rivalry in 30 years. While Michigan had arguably the more talented and complete team for the first three of those wins, nothing could quite explain their 13-10 victory in Columbus last year against a Buckeyes team that went on to win the national championship (while the Wolverines, hindered by a constipated offense, managed just an 8-5 mark). Leading Ohio State to a national title bought Ryan Day significant goodwill from a fanbase that has long been skeptical of him, but losing to Michigan for a fifth-consecutive season will put him awfully close to where he was 12 months ago, with fans calling for his ouster and posting his address online. Such is life in a rivalry so heated that it’s simply known as “The Game.”
Kalen DeBoer isn’t in the same kind of predicament Day is, as the second-year Alabama coach is 1-0 against archrival Auburn. Then again, he also doesn’t have the luxury of being 10 months removed from a national championship and with six losses in fewer than two full seasons already to his name, he can’t afford to fall to a 5-6 Tigers team playing under an interim coach. If the Crimson Tide somehow get upset, DeBoer likely won’t be in danger of losing his job, but like many of his predecessors, he may look to get out before he no longer has the benefit of a choice, especially with reports coming out of State College that he’s a top target for the Penn State vacancy.
In recent years, the Egg Bowl has finally gotten its due for being one of the sport’s most unhinged rivalries. This year, it marks the cathartic end of one of the thirstiest and most grating coaching conundrums in recent memory, with Lane Kiffin set to reveal where he’ll be coaching next season after Friday’s game, as if white smoke were coming out of a chimney at The Vatican. Kiffin has enjoyed a redemptive arc with few peers in the history of college football, but all these past few weeks of speculation and teases have done is make me believe Al Davis was right about him.
With an undefeated record, Texas A&M is almost certainly in the College Football Playoff field regardless of how it fares against Texas on Friday, but as we all know, that cold calculus unburdened by emotion isn’t how rivalries work. Last year, in the first meeting between the programs in 13 years, the Aggies suffered a gut punch, falling at home to the Longhorns to see their playoff dreams evaporate. This year, they have a chance for revenge in Austin. A win there would do something even sweeter than cap off a perfect regular season – it would kill whatever playoff hopes its archival is currently clinging on to.
With one more win, Vanderbilt would finish the regular season 10-2 and be in position for a once-unthinkable playoff berth. To get there, though, the Commodores will have to win on the road against a Tennessee program that has long overshadowed it in its own state and even its own city.
Virginia’s in the middle of a dream season, with a 9-2 record after being picked 14th of 17 teams in the ACC’s preseason poll. With one more win, it will make the ACC championship game, where it will compete for a spot in the playoff. All it has to do to get there is win at home against a hated in-state rival that it has knocked off only once since 2004. No pressure, guys.
My favorite things I read this week
Neil Paine on the diminishing stakes of rivalry week in college football
Griffin Olah at SID Sports with a look at where things stand with the college football coaching carousel
Sally Jenkins in The Atlantic on how to fix college sports’ financial mess
I genuinely don’t know how much interest there is outside of journalism circles in the whole Olivia Nuzzi-Ryan Lizza-RFK Jr. ordeal, but I’m equally fascinated, horrified and disheartened by it. Brian Phillips at The Ringer has an excellent breakdown of it all
This story’s from back in February, but as someone confused by some (scratch that, all) of these Matthew McConaughey SalesForce AI ads, I enjoyed Alan Kluegel’s piece on it at Defector. Seriously, a restaurant’s not going to seat any patron – let alone a world-famous movie star – outdoors in the middle of a downpour. Besides, what does any of that have to do with AI?