Might Some (Needed) Changes Be On The Way For Early Season Tournaments?

Given that we’re now deep into football season and still a few weeks away from tip-off, you probably missed a press release last Wednesday (September 19th) from East Tennessee State‘s athletic department. It mentioned that in 2019 the Buccaneers would be joining a new mid-major non-conference scheduling consortium called The Alliance—spearheaded by former coach and current analyst Mark Adams. The goal of this new grouping is to give high-quality mid-major programs more opportunities to schedule appropriate non-conference matchups, both home and on the road, eventually branching out into multiple-team events (MTEs) starting in 2020. But the lede of this release isn’t what drew my attention. About midway down, the following comments from ETSU coach Steve Forbes jumped out at me (emphasis mine).

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