Coach K: We Can’t Miss Another Tournament

Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski has argued for years that college basketball needs a commissioner. The Covid-19 pandemic has really reinforced that argument as Coach K pointed out Tuesday on Jason Williams’ new ESPN radio show, Keyshawn, JWIll & Zubin. It’s not in the link below but we saw some reference to it earlier. If we find that link again we’ll add it in.

He also made a strong argument for the necessity of the NCAA tournament, saying that “We’re the thing that the NCAA is most concerned about because men’s college basketball and the tournament pays for something like ... it produces 98% or more of the money for the NCAA. We need to have the tournament. We can’t have it where two years in a row you don’t have the NCAA tournament.”

Interestingly, on the same show John Calipari echoed a long-time argument we’ve made in favor of a pre-season tournament. He’s arguing for an expanded round-robin version of the Champion’s Classic, the annual event with Duke, Kansas, Michigan State and Calipari’s Kentucky.

We’ve argued for a larger event but that would still make a difference. He’s arguing for some less well regarded teams to get in to help them make up some revenue lost to the pandemic.

The NCAA’s Dan Gavitt also weighed in with some thoughts on how the season might pan out.