Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports
Before you write off the bevy of November college basketball tip-off tournaments as unimportant and gimmicky, I ask you to pause, breathe and reconsider. No sport can begin a season the way it ends one, but college basketball comes the closest. It gives viewers a little taste, just the slightest whiff of the very thing that leaves fans wanting more at the end of March: brackets.
Tournaments do not exist in the four major American sports during the regular season. But college basketball managed to inject meaning and a level of fun into the start of its season by creating a series of bracketed tip-off tournaments that often set up unique non-conference matchups while offering fans the chance to immediately overreact to their favorite group of teenagers that have not been playing together nearly long enough to look like an actual basketball team.