A couple days ago, I was having my morning coffee and thinking about the incredible sports week we have coming up on the week of Thanksgiving. The NBA Cup, NFL Thanksgiving and Black Friday, college football rivalry week, and the college basketball invitationals. What a great week of sports that is! You would be hard pressed to find a better week as a sports fan. Then, it hit me. “Why I haven’t I heard anything about the Maui Invitational?” I thought to myself. I instantly went to look up the group of teams participating this year. What I found was one of the most disappointing groups I can think of.

In case you missed it (just like I did), the teams playing in the Maui are Arizona State, Boise State, Chaminade, North Carolina State, Seton Hall, Texas, USC, and Washington State. It’s not that the teams this year are necessarily nobodies. However, they just don’t have the prestige that we have seen in past Maui Invitationals. NC State has had the most recent success with the cinderella Final Four run in 2024. However, if that’s the program with most prestige in the Maui, we have a real problem on our hands.

In past years, the Maui has been a showcase for some of the best teams in college basketball. In the last ten years, there have been eight winners of the Maui that ended up in the Top 25, two that made the Elite Eight, and one National Champion. I just don’t see any of these teams living up to that same success. The most likely team to fit that mold would be USC. Again though, I think that team’s ceiling is falling into the backend of the Top 25. I was would really like to see more juice in the Maui than that.

The reason why the Maui is having a hard time getting better teams to the island is not a secret. It’s money. You see, there is another invitational this year called the Players Era Festival. This invitational is backed by huge corporate sponsors who are not only paying the schools to play in the invitational, but also the players themselves. The Players Era Festival is paying out around $9 million in NIL money to the participating players this year. With all that in mind, it’s pretty easy to see why schools would want to go play there instead of in the Maui.

So what’s the solution then? Well, there really is none. The Maui has to try to sell the history and prestige of their invitational against the big money being offered at the Players Era. Spoiler Alert: The big money is going to win every time. You don’t have to like it, but that’s just the world of college sports we are living in now.

The Maui Invitational just holds so much sentimental value to me. Staying up on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving to watch a Top 25 matchup in the Maui championship game is one of my favorite traditions. However, it looks like those times might just be over. Unless someone steps in with a ton of money to offer schools to go to Maui, I have a feeling this Invitational is going to become completely irrelevant. I’m not going to cry because it’s over. I’m going to smile because it happened.