College basketball needs the PK80 Invitational to become an annual event

On Sunday night in Portland, No. 4 Michigan State manhandled No. 9 North Carolina and top-ranked Duke roared back to take down No. 7 Florida in the final games of the PK80 Invitational. The top-10 tilts were a satisfying cap on three days of basketball that fulfilled the wishes of hoop heads who have been clamoring for an early season event like this for years.

Now it’s time to fulfill that wish on an annual basis.

While the PK80 was supposed to be a one-time deal to celebrate the 80th birthday of Nike co-founder and chairman emeritus Phil Knight, who says it has to be? This is how things work. You put together a small get together with a close group of friends just to see how things go, and if it goes well enough, 25 years later the party’s an annual event attended by half the city.

The party in Portland that the college basketball world was just privy to is the type of March Madness pre-cursor that can only help strengthen the sport.

Before the first game tipped off, the PK80’s website described the event as “the best collection of college basketball teams in one event, at a single site, in the history of the sport.” While it’s impossible to fact check something like that, the claim certainly isn’t ridiculous.

Through the first two and-a-half weeks of the 2017-18 season, Duke, Florida, and Michigan State have looked like the three best teams in the country. North Carolina and Gonzaga, last season’s two national finalists, are both legitimate top 15-20 teams. Arkansas, Texas, and Butler could all be teams that play their way into the NCAA tournament and then have success in the Big Dance. A few of the other teams in the field also possess the ability to make noise in their respective leagues once the calendar flips to 2018.

And look at the gifts these collection of teams gave us since Thanksgiving morning.

There was Duke, the consensus No. 1 team in the country, overcoming a second half deficit in all three of its games. The Blue Devils stormed back from 16 down to top Texas in overtime on Friday, and then faced a 15-point second half deficit in the championship game before nipping Florida.

At the center of all of those rallies was Marvin Bagley III, who both solidified his status as the best NBA prospect in college basketball, and established himself as an early front-runner national Player of the Year honors. In three games, the incredibly gifted 6’11 freshman notched 82 points and 45 rebounds on his way to tournament MVP honors.

We also got to see Butler enact revenge on Chris Holtmann, the head coach who left the program to take the same job at Ohio State. The Bulldogs trailed by 15 points with under four minutes to go, but forced overtime and ultimately prevailed on Kelan Martin’s bucket in the closing seconds.

Friday gave us perhaps the most exciting game of the season to date, with Florida and Gonzaga trading haymakers until around 2:30 a.m. on the East Coast. The Gators ultimately prevailed in double overtime, 111-105.

In all, the tournament gave us five games that went to overtime, three games that featured multiple teams ranked in the top 20, two games that featured multiple teams ranked in the top 10, 12 of the 50 players on preseason Wooden Award watch list, and six games that were decided by five points or fewer.

Who wouldn’t want to do this every year?

During the pre-Super Bowl portion of the sports calendar, there aren’t a whole lot of opportunities for college basketball to make headlines that go wherever the 2017 equivalent of above the fold is. A holiday weekend where there are some significant gaps between the highest-profile football games certainly fits that bill.

While basketball at any level is never going to usurp football as Thanksgiving’s chosen son, this year proved that the sport can at least establish itself a noteworthy niche. Throughout “Feast Week,” college basketball spent more time in the national discussion than you typically see from the sport before the start of conference play. More than a few high-profile sports personalities not known for their thoughts on college basketball expressed their affinity for the event — specifically having something fun to watch at odd hours on Thanksgiving weekend — on social media.

The tournament also fits well into the structure that college basketball has established for Thanksgiving week. The Maui Invitational, still the most widely-recognized early season tournament, rolls from Monday to Wednesday. The Battle 4 Atlantis gets going on Wednesday and then wraps on Friday with an early afternoon title game. The PK80 then hit us with a whopping eight games on Thanksgiving day, more competitive semifinal tilts on Friday — then it went ahead and stepped aside for the final day of college football’s regular season — and finished the loaded week with a bang on Sunday. It worked perfectly.

With the collection of talent in Portland, it’s no surprise fans were treated to three full days of basketball that gave us more enjoyment and excitement than any other weekend will give us between now and March. But it doesn’t even have to be like this every year for the annual event to have significant worth. Lord knows there are enough Nike schools out there to create a rotation that would make the event worth tuning into each and every November. This tournament seemed filled to the brim with talent, and it didn’t even include Nike powers like Kentucky, Arizona, Syracuse, Michigan, Virginia and West Virginia.

Call it the “Pk81,” the “Phil Knight Invitational” or the “Super Cool November Basketball Tournament.” It doesn’t matter, just make sure it keeps being played on a yearly basis. Not doing so would keep college basketball deeper in the shadows before March and deprive the entire sports world of some top-shelf holiday weekend entertainment.