This is the week college basketball comes with sunglasses and Aloha shirts. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, gee, the games can be terrific, there’s no place like hoops by the beach for the holiday.
Attendance figures don’t matter. Many of the sites are comparative closets for the Division I heavyweights. It’s about the ambience. So let’s go for a little tour, paying particular attention not to the teams as much as the destinations.
Take the Greenbrier Tip-Off at the Greenbrier Resort, hiding in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. The resort has been around since 1778 and seen several US Presidents as guests, and way more horse-drawn carriages through its lifetime than team buses. There’s even a bunker nearby that was built to isolate members of Congress in the event of a nuclear war. The Soviets would never find them there. There’s also Colonial Hall, which has hosted elegant dinners, themed parties – and last weekend Butler beating Virginia to win the Tip-Off.
High Point, coming off its first NCAA tournament bid in history, just won the Boardwalk Battle in Daytona Beach. That was at the Ocean Center, which is 400 feet from the beach. Lots of groups visit the Ocean Center before heading for the pier and waves. There’s a tattoo convention coming in later. Also more basketball starting Monday with both brackets of the Sunshine Slam. One of the teams winning its first game only a block from the Atlantic was Pacific.
Purdue put a headlock on the No. 1 ranking by crushing No. 15 Texas Tech 86-56 to win the Baha Mar Championship in the Bahamas. Never mind the Boilermakers rolling to their biggest regular season winning margin over a non-conference ranked opponent in school history, or putting seven players in double figures for the first time in at least two decades. What about the yoga sessions you can have with the flamingos? Or meeting the macaws at Baha Bay? Or the new giant tortoise habitat?
And what about Matt Painter’s postgame press conference after beating Memphis? Just when he was discussing the tough victory over the Tigers, a member of the island fowl community somehow slipped in and flew through the setting. Think you’d see that in West Lafayette after the Iowa game in January?
Painter hardly blinked. Hey, this is the Bahamas. “Expect the unexpected, right?” he said. But what exactly was it? “It was not a flamingo I know that. And it wasn’t Tweety Bird.”
Apparently the Boilermakers love this stuff. They’ve won five November tournaments in a row, from Nassau to San Diego to Maui.
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In less exotic climes, Nebraska just won the Hall of Fame Classic in Kansas City. That’s T-Mobile Center, and while there are no string rays and nurse sharks on display, the place has seen a few mean bovines. It’s home for the Kansas City Outlaws of Professional Bull Riding.
By the way, guess who has the nation’s longest winning streak? Yep, Nebraska, at 10 in a row. That goes back to winning the College Basketball Crown tournament last April in Las Vegas at T-Mobile Arena. So the Huskers probably also have the longest winning streak in buildings called T-Mobile something.
Clemson outlasted Georgia 97-94 in overtime to win the Palmetto bracket of the Shriners Children’s Charleston Classic in Charleston, S.C. That’d be TD Arena in downtown Charleston, just up the street from where you can hop on a ferry to Fort Sumter in the harbor to see where the biggest shots in the history of the city were taken.
All this is not to be confused with the Lowcountry bracket of the Charleston Classic, which was won just a few hours later by Utah State sweeping past Davidson 94-60 with 40 points from MJ Collins Jr., a South Carolina native son no less.
Southern Mississippi beat UT Martin Sunday to take the Pensacola Invitational. That’s Pensacola Bay Center, where future attractions include the Coastal Wedding Expo and Pensacon, which is not a basketball tournament but a pop culture convention celebrating the worlds of science fiction, comic books, video games and such.
The Bay Center might be a short hop from the white sands of Pensacola Beach and the Gulf of Mexico, but there is also public ice skating and a hockey team. If Pensacola is not often considered an international destination, it was when the UT Martin basketball team came to town. The Skyhawks have 12 countries represented on their roster. But nobody from Tennessee.
The tropical basketball tour really gets going this week.
Of course there’s the Maui Classic, where the surfers are never far away. The Lahaina Civic Center is a cozy spot in paradise with only 2,400 seats but the biggest names in the game have spent Thanksgiving week there. Duke has won it five times.
This is the place UConn visited last November as the No. 2 team in the land and mighty defending national champion and melted down for three losses in a row. It took a long time for Dan Hurley to recover, if he ever did.
Odd thing about the 2025 edition, which starts Monday — No. 23 North Carolina State was the only ranked team in last week’s Associated Press poll in the field. But the sunsets over the Pacific will still be wonderful.
The 18-team Players Era Festival has gobbled up a lot of the marquee names — Auburn, Alabama, Gonzaga, Houston, Michigan, St. John’s, etc. — and they’ll be spending the week on the Las Vegas Strip. The key spot is the MGM Grand Garden Arena, where Mike Tyson once unforgettably took a bite out of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Presumably it won’t come to that if Houston is playing Michigan for the title. To get to the arena from the front desk you need to walk through the MGM Grand casino — all 144,000 square feet, with its 1,300 slot machines.
We can see if Troy is up to more drama in the Geico Coconut Hoops tournament in Fort Myers. The Trojans come off a lively week on the other side of the continent, when they beat San Diego State 108-107 in two overtimes and two days later lost to USC 107-106 in three overtimes. That’s a lot of turbulence but Alico Arena, site of the Coconut Hoops, has seen uproar before. This is Florida. It has been used as a hurricane shelter. P.S. Troy lost its first game to Toledo 75-68.
Just 26 miles away, Michigan State and North Carolina will be meeting in the Fort Myers Tip-Off at Suncoast Credit Union Arena, home to Florida SouthWestern State’s junior college team. Way, way, way up the Gulf Coast in Florida at another junior college facility — Raider Arena at Northwest Florida State College — the likes of DePaul and Georgia Tech will be in the Emerald Coast Classic. You can either hit the beach at Destin not far from the arena or take a look at Eglin Air Force Base where the Jimmy Doolittle raiders trained for their famous Tokyo mission in World War II, which is why Northwest Florida State’s teams are the Raiders.
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There’s a parade of teams going through the Palm Springs area where the Acrisure Series has four different brackets at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert. That’s where they get rain maybe 13 days a year and there’s a swell view of the San Jacinto Mountains. It’s supposed to be in the 80s this week. One of the teams in town will be Minnesota. Back on campus, the low is predicted to be 16 degrees.
There’s the Magic, Imagination and Adventure brackets at ESPN Events Invitational in Lake Buena Vista, Fla, where the Magic Kingdom is but seven miles from the arena.
BYU is the big name in the field, but what about Georgetown, off to a 5-0 start for the first time in eight years, only two seasons removed from going 22-73 in a three-year span? The Hoyas play Dayton. The last time they met was the 1984 Elite Eight and the Georgetown center was named Patrick Ewing.
There’s Wisconsin, TCU and Providence all gunning for national champion Florida at the Rady Children’s Invitational in San Diego, played at Jenny Craig Pavilion, named after the weight loss guru. They don’t call it the Slim Gym for nothing.
And there’s always the Battle 4 Atlantis, where the chandeliers are taken down, a court is rolled over the carpet, and a ballroom in the Bahamas is transformed into a basketball arena. That’s where we’ll see if the Vanderbilt fireworks show continues. The Commodores have scored 104 or more points four times already and lead the nation in scoring. The last time they broke 100 four times in a season was 1976. They have 107 assists this season but only 38 turnovers. They’re hot.
But then, so are the Bahamas. College basketball will be serious business soon enough. This week it comes with palm trees and snorkel gear.
