Thanksgiving Week. The time for turkey, family, football…and exempt college basketball tournaments. This week will bring us the Maui Invitational, Battle 4 Atlantis, Old Spice Classic, Wooden Legacy, Great Alaska Shootout, Cancun Challenge, Legends Classic, the conclusion of the NIT Season Tip-Off and more. Lost amongst all the major schools playing in their tournaments this week is a new player on the exempt tournament list — the Gulf Coast Showcase. The Germain Arena is Estero, Florida is the site the next three days for this mid-major focused event.
The tournament starts today with four quarterfinal round games (all times Eastern):
12:00 PM – Louisiana Tech vs UNC-Greensboro
2:30 PM – Illinois-Chicago vs San Diego
6:00 PM – Wagner vs Stetson
8:30 PM – Southern Illinois vs St. Bonaventure
The semifinals and consolation bracket semifinals will be played on Tuesday, and the final games (1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th places) will be played Wednesday. Streaming video of the entire event is available at http://gcs.bdglobalsports.com/.
Louisiana Tech, on paper at least, appears to be the best team in this field. However, San Diego has also been off to a solid start and could give them a challenge in the semifinal round. On the other side of the bracket, the team to beat appears to be Wagner, who already has a home victory over Vermont this season — and by now everyone should know what Vermont almost did at Duke last night.
While the Gulf Coast Showcase is certainly not one of the marquee highlight events of this exciting week of exempt tournaments — it does give us a chance to see a full field of mid-major programs participate in a tournament, as opposed to the majority of the other exempt events which historically have not allowed more than a small handful of these schools into their fields each year.