Ben Steele Has All Of The Future Marquette Basketball Tournament Plans

Back on Monday evening, intrepid Marquette beat reporter Ben Steele took to Twitter to inform us of the future of Marquette basketball’s early season tournament scheduling.

We already know that MU will be in the NIT Tip Off this season, and Jon Rothstein already told us that Marquette will be going to Disney World for the Advocare Invitational in November of 2019. Here’s what’s coming up after that:

2020: Hall Of Fame Tip Off Classic

This event is a 4 team event masquerading as an 8 team event, and it’s held every year at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. Eight teams will be in Connecticut, but they’re divided into two groups. For example, this year, the event will have Michigan, George Washington, South Carolina, and Providence in one group, and Stony Brook, Norfolk State, Holy Cross, and Siena in the other. While it will only be two games at the casino, a glance at the associated schedules for this year tells us that Marquette will end up hosting two of the teams from the other bracket before making the trip east. Recent winners include Texas Tech, Duke, and Purdue. This event has only been going since 2011, and MU has never been a part of it.

2021: Charleston Classic

This is a standard eight team tournament bracket with consolation games guaranteeing everyone three games out at TD Arena in Charleston, South Carolina. The fields seem to be a mix of high and mid-major teams. For example, here’s this year’s participants: Purdue, Wichita State, Alabama, Davidson, Northeastern, Appalachian State, Ball State, and Virginia Tech. Without knowing anything about the rest of the field for the future, I’d like to believe that Marquette would end up as the favorite to win. Recent winners of the event are Temple, Villanova, and Virginia. This will be Marquette’s first appearance in the event, which has been going on since 2008.

2023: Maui Invitational

This is, of course, the most famous and popular of the early season multi-team events, held every year at the Lahaina Civic Center, in Lahaina, Hawaii, on the island of — SPOILER ALERT — Maui. While we’re a long way away from finding out the full field for this one, we can pretty much guess that it will be pretty stacked up. The 2018 iteration of this tournament includes Arizona, Auburn, Duke, Gonzaga, Illinois, Iowa State, San Diego State, and Xavier. All but one of those teams will lose at least one game in Hawaii this year. There’s three preseason top 11 teams in that field, and Maui booked Arizona several years ago back when it was safe to bet that the Wildcats would be a top 25 team for sure.

Anyway, we don’t know who will be heading to Hawaii with Marquette, but we can be sure that it’ll be a good field. It’s also nice to see that Marquette is officially in the permanent rotation for Maui now. This will be MU’s fourth appearance in the invitational, following along behind 2007, 2012, and 2017. It’s not quite every four years in accordance with the NCAA rules on these events, but it’s a near regular appearance for the Golden Eagles now.

In case you were wondering, no, there is not a typo in the article. As for right now, there is nothing slated for 2022 at the moment. At least not officially. November 2022 would be five years after the PK80 event out in Oregon and there has been tiny amounts of buzzing about putting together another event to celebrate Phil Knight’s 85th birthday. That, of course, would be in 2022, and as a Jordan Brand team, you’d have to figure that the Nike honchos would be interested in putting Marquette into the event on some level.

Merely a theory and speculation for now, but that would explain the lack of a definitive plan for the time being, or at the very least, the lack of anything that could be safely reported at this juncture.