Don't expect Kentucky to be part of the Players Era Festival anytime soon

Feast Week is finally here, and this year, the highlight is the Players Era Festival, an 18-team tournament in Las Vegas that guarantees each team at least $1 million in Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) money, with another $1 million split between the teams that finish in the top four. Some of the best teams in the country are participating, including Houston, Alabama, Gonzaga, Michigan, Kansas, Tennessee, Auburn, and Iowa State. With games going on nonstop for four days at two different arenas on the Strip, it’s a college basketball fan’s dream.

Even though the Players Era field is expanding again to 32 teams next year, don’t get your hopes up for Kentucky to be one of them. Mark Pope told Matt Norlander that Kentucky would need to be paid close to $5 million to participate in an event like the Players Era festival to make up for the revenue it would lose by not having three home games. That’s money that Players Era isn’t currently offering to a single squad. Fellow blue bloods like Duke, North Carolina, UConn, and UCLA also haven’t committed to the event, likely due to similar reasons.

By that math, Kentucky brings in roughly $1.6 million per home game, which is pretty wild, and with revenue-sharing now upon us, not something you can just wave off to go to Vegas for a week. Or maybe even Maui. Since Mark Pope took the job in 2024, fans have been clamoring for the team to return to the Maui Invitational. Pope himself has said there’s nothing he’d love more than to make that a reality, but Kentucky’s scheduling obligations (and therefore budget) come first.

“It definitely won’t be next year,” Pope said in April about Kentucky potentially participating in the Maui Invitational or another holiday tournament. “We have some obligations here at Rupp in terms of number of games, so until we work out a couple other things — our in-house [multi-team event] is super important because it fulfills our obligation with number of games, but it is an aspiration that we’re all chasing.”

Players Era co-founder Ian Orefice told Jeff Goodman that next year’s event will be spread over three weeks in Vegas. Sixteen of the 32 teams will be broken into two eight-team events the first week, and the same for the second half of the field the second week. In the third week, the winners of the first two weeks will square off. Feast Week will soon become Feast Month. Louisville, Florida, Virginia, Texas A&M, and Miami are all set to join the field next year.

Meanwhile, unless Pope can move some mountains, Kentucky will likely be back at Rupp, raking in money against the Loyola Marylands and Tennessee Techs of the world, an unfortunate reality in the revenue-sharing era.