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Rules change made ESPN the king of early-season holiday basketball tournaments

In 2006, the NCAA made two moves it knew would precipitate a boom in early-season tournaments, or "multi-team events," in November and December, Luke Winn writes, adding that the explosion in multi-team events initially happened, but since subsided. Ultimately, Winn writes, the rule changes’ effect was to empower ESPN to create programming without the NCAA’s financial supervision. "I don’t think it was the NCAA’s intention at the time, but they anointed ESPN king of the [early-season tournament] world from one day to the next," says Steve Cobb, the athletic director at University of Alaska-Anchorage, which is the last school left that owns and operates a full-format early-season tournament, the 32-year-old Great Alaska Shootout.
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