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Phil Knight Invitational unveils loaded field featuring nine prior national champs

Nike founder Phil Knight (AP)
Nike founder Phil Knight (AP)

The college basketball event honoring Nike founder Phil Knight will feature one of the strongest fields ever assembled for a holiday tournament.

Thirteen of the 16 Nike-sponsored schools participating have reached a Final Four and nine have won at least one national championship.

The Phil Knight Invitational will take place over Thanksgiving weekend in 2017 and will consist of two separate eight-team tournaments held simultaneously in two different Portland arenas. Brackets for the one-time-only event have yet to be announced, but no league can have more than one team in either tournament.

Duke and North Carolina will represent the ACC. Michigan State and Ohio State will represent the Big Ten. The other 12 participants include Florida, Arkansas, Oregon, Stanford, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgetown, Butler, Gonzaga, UConn, Portland and Portland State.

Of college basketball’s prominent Nike programs, Kentucky, Arizona, Villanova and Xavier are among the few who will not be part of this event.

Oregon and Stanford received the Pac-12’s two invitations instead of Arizona because they are the two schools from which Knight holds a degree. Xavier and Kentucky were part of a tentative list of participants back in 2012, but the Musketeers move from the Atlantic 10 to the Big East may have cost them a spot and the Wildcats were replaced by Arkansas.

Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis came up with the event as a way of celebrating Knight’s 80th birthday and honoring his contributions to college basketball. Hollis had to wait until Nov. 2017 to implement it because many of the elite programs participating had committed to other preseason tournaments through 2016.

A single 16-team field may have been preferable to parallel eight-team events, but NCAA rules dictate that multiple teams from the same conference cannot participate in the same exempt tournament. The event surely also could have been stronger had it included the likes of Kansas, Indiana or UCLA, each of whom were not eligible for invitations since they’re not Nike schools.

Regardless, no other holiday tournament in 2017 will come close to matching the star power and brand recognition the Phil Knight Invitational will offer. It may be the rare blockbuster college hoops event big enough to draw attention away from football for a few days in November.

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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!