00:00Kurt, let's get to this exclusive you have over at Sportico here.
00:03You'll have to tell me more about this.
00:05Players' Era, a college basketball multi-team event that we've been hearing about now for years.
00:11Trying to get off the ground here, asking for a significant amount of money.
00:16Tell us more about this story that's up at sportico.com.
00:19Sure. Players' Era, they've run a preseason college basketball tournament.
00:25We've had preseason college basketball tournaments kind of since the beginning of time.
00:30And they're usually in very nice locales and a place for a team to do some bonding and to broadcast
00:38some games.
00:39There's usually very little TV money in these deals.
00:42There's maybe an ad rev share involved in this.
00:46But Players' Era, since they launched, November was the second year of the tournament.
00:53But since they've launched, they've come out hot, making a lot of big proclamations.
01:00What they're paying is they're paying the schools and the students NIL money.
01:06Huge, huge numbers that we've never seen before in this kind of arrangement.
01:13But the rub is there's a lot of teams and players who said, we never got the money.
01:18And they were asking originally trying to do a TV deal, you know, for more than $100 million.
01:25Now they've scaled those back looking for $50 million.
01:27But that still is so beyond the pale of what these kind of tournaments really ever have commanded on broadcast
01:36TV.
01:36So it's a very, very, really murky situation going on with Players' Era.
01:40And a lot of these college basketball players are still waiting for their money from last November's event.
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