What is the College Basketball Crown?

For the second straight season, the Stanford Cardinal will play postseason basketball. Finishing with a second straight 20 or more win season under second-year head coach, Kyle Smith, the Cardinal once again set a solid foundation for the future, and will look to win a championship when they take part in the College Basketball Crown for the first time this month.

The College Basketball Crown is a postseason tournament that is for teams that did not qualify for March Madness that also comes with some financial incentives.

For decades, college basketball fans have thought of the NIT when their team didn't qualify for March Madness. And even though the NIT is still alive and well, the College Basketball Crown is bringing the stakes of non-March Madness college basketball to a whole new level.

Launched last year by Fox Sports and the entertainment company, AEG, the College Basketball Crown, aka the CBC, is an eight-team single-elimination tournament—mostly for Power Four teams not in March Madness—played at both the T-Mobile Arena and MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Emphasizing NIL opportunities, the winning program wins a $500,000 prize pool. Six out of the eight teams earn automatic bids based on their NET rankings position at the end of the season, as the top two NET teams from the Big 12, Big Ten and Big East are automatically entered in the CBC.

That leaves a limited number of spots for other programs that can qualify for the condensed tournament, and this year, Stanford was one of those programs.

Including Stanford, the other participants in this year's tournament are Baylor, Colorado, Creighton, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Rutgers and West Virginia. Baylor, Creighton, Minnesota, Rutgers and West Virginia all received automatic bids, while Stanford, Oklahoma and Colorado all received the remaining at-large bids.

Set to take place between April 1-5, around the time that March Madness ends, the games will air on Fox and FS1, putting these teams on full display for everyone to see. The winner of the inaugural tournament last season was Nebraska, who earned a spot in March Madness this year after a big resurgent campaign.

The College Basketball Crown may be new and still unknown, but the high caliber teams combined with the high stakes should make this tournament a fun one to watch for any college basketball fan, while giving them more basketball to enjoy as March Madness winds down.

Stanford will have their chance to be a part of the beginning of this tournament's history, too, which adds another level of excitement.

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