3 thoughts on San Diego State in the Players Era Festival

LAS VEGAS – Three thoughts on San Diego State at the Players Era Festival, a 94-54 loss to Michigan, a 97-80 win against Oregon and a 91-81 loss to Baylor.

1. The endgame

During a timeout in the first half of Auburn against St. John’s on Wednesday night, the 22nd of 27 games here this week, the video board showed a man in gray hoodie and sunglasses in the stands, asleep.

The arena announcer tried to rally the sparse crowd to make noise and wake him up. He kept sleeping.

The question now becomes, can the Players Era Festival wake up college basketball?

It’s trying. The Feast Week extravaganza has gone from eight teams to 18 to a planned 32 next year, split into eight-team regional pods with “four kings” advancing to a fall Final Four in Las Vegas. Most teams are guaranteed $1 million just for showing up, plus a $1 million bonus for the champion.

The first goal was to take control of nonconference basketball and weaken the traditional November tournaments, most notably the Maui Invitational and the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas. That’s already happening, with their usually stacked fields featuring no one in the Associated Press top 20.

The next goal is to collect even more of the nation’s top programs, and that’s happening, too. This year’s field included eight ranked teams and four others receiving votes. Louisville, Florida, Texas A&M, Miami and Virginia join the fun next year. Earlier in the week, the Big 12 announced a $50 million equity partnership through 2029 that guarantees its top eight finishers from the previous season.

In this regard, SDSU is fortunate. It was one of the first schools to take the leap of faith for the inaugural event last year, signing a three-year contract, and has been rewarded with a commitment through the end of the decade – vital, irreplaceable income for one of the few mid-majors here.

The organizers claim this year’s event will be profitable despite near-empty arenas for many games and a $20 million payout, which is met with skepticism from others in the industry. If Maui and the Battle 4 Atlantis could pay its participants that kind of cash and not bleed red ink, they would.

What the Players Era Festival has that they don’t is Redbird IMI, the New York-based investment firm largely bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates sovereign wealth fund. When you have access to that kind of speculative capital, you can take short-term financial risks with an eye toward long-term objectives.

Which are, exactly, what?

The current target is filling the sports wasteland between the World Series and NFL playoffs. College basketball has its conference season with traditional rivalries followed by March Madness, but the first two months of the schedule – a sleepy mash of MTEs (multi-team events) and blowout buy games – are ripe for revolution.

The real jackpot, though, is still in March, and you have wonder if that is the end game. Could the NCAA lose control of basketball the way it did the College Football Playoffs? What would happen to the NCAA Tournament if the power conferences, as some predict, form a breakaway entity? Could a big-money rival event do to the Big Dance what the Players Era Festival has done to Maui?

The nation’s top basketball programs have already shown a desperate willingness to chase petrodollars in November at the expense of tradition and the tropics. Who’s to say they wouldn’t do the same in March?

“We had no choice,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said of the Players Era Festival. “Have you seen our budget? Have you seen our fundraising? We had no choice. We have to raise our money. I had to get our administration to understand how important it was to follow through on the decision I made to be in this tournament.

“Sign the forms. Sign them today.”

2. S-SU, without the D

The Aztecs have just one game over the next 13 days, which means they’ll have nine or 10 practices. They’ll use them to try and fix … their defense?

Maybe the best way to understand the sudden, shocking decline of what annually has been one of college basketball’s most fearsome defenses is to look at points per 100 possessions.

The national average is 107.5. SDSU the last six seasons has finished at 94.6, 94.0, 90.4, 86.3, 91.1 and 90.6. Over the previous 200 regular-season games, it allowed opponents to top 120 only twice.

This year? It’s happened three times in the last four games: 120.5 by Troy, 124.5 by Michigan and 128.8 by Baylor on Wednesday.

“Our defense has to get better, or I have to find better ways to defend,” coach Brian Dutcher said. “That’s a little on them and a little on me. We have to find better schemes to what we do, and they have to execute game plans to perfection if we’re going to have a chance to be the defensive team we want to be.”

Added senior guard Sean Newman Jr.: “That’s not winning basketball on the defensive end.”

They have especially struggled against undersized teams that run a modern, analytics-based, five-out offense without a traditional post clogging the paint. Troy had five shooters spread across the perimeter, then drove the Aztecs defenders into an open lane without the threat of shot blockers. Baylor, starting four guards and a power forward all 6-foot-8 or smaller, had a similar strategy.

“We knew they were going to try to pull (6-foot-9 Miles) Heide and (7-foot Magoon Gwath) away from the basket and drive them and get them in foul trouble, and that’s what happened,” Dutcher said. “And we weren’t able to prevent it in a one-day prep.”

The counter that a growing number of teams are employing is a “hybrid” man and zone defense, where you switch everything vertically to keep your rim protectors under the basket and away from guarding smaller players on the perimeter. Dutcher toyed with it in practice earlier this month and actually used it out of desperation in the closing minutes of regulation against Troy, when his team came from 12 points down to force overtime before losing.

He admitted it’s still not a finished product.

“We didn’t use it here, but we’ve worked on it,” Dutcher said. “I’ll use it more when I have time to do a scout and actually practice it against what the other team is doing. We don’t do it enough where I want to throw it out there and just hope it works.

“We’re working at it, and I think it could be good for us – a la what Michigan does and try to leave size under the rim and make them finish over us. It’s something we’re looking at moving forward. … I have to find ways to change up our defense where we’re not putting our players in positions where they’re not comfortable guarding.”

3. The Elzie era

If there was a positive that came from a week with two losses by a combined 50 points, it was that the Elzie Harrington era has dawned on the Mesa.

Dutcher, usually a patient man when it comes to these things, didn’t want any longer to insert his 6-6 true freshman point guard into the starting lineup ahead of sophomore Taj DeGourville, who had won the job during fall practice but hit a rough patch in his hometown, and Newman, who started 56 times for Louisiana Tech over the past two seasons.

“I just thought Elzie played well enough to deserve an opportunity to step in there,” Dutcher said.

In three games in Las Vegas, Harrington had 15, 12 and 12 points while shooting 15 of 24 overall (62.5%) and a perfect 6 of 6 behind the arc with eight assists against three turnovers. All that in an average of 21 minutes.

And this coming off the only time he has looked like a freshman, a one-assist, six-turnover performance against Troy.

“I wasn’t necessarily super happy with how I played the first two games (of the season),” Harrington said of wins against Long Beach State and Idaho State, “but people were telling me I was playing well and I think I got caught up in that.”

It doesn’t sound like this is a temporary move, either, meaning two veterans will now have to back him up. The question moving forward is how they handle it.

BJ Davis was in a similar situation, starting 31 games last season and now coming off the bench. He responded in Las Vegas with 43 total points, SDSU’s leading scorer.

“I told them after the game, I gave BJ credit,” Dutcher said. “He is the perfect example, because he went through two weeks of frustration and came out the other side. He’s playing with such great energy and motivation. You can be sad for a little while, but you have to fight your way out of it and find joy in playing, whatever their opportunity is.

“That will give them the best chance of success.”