The Emerald Coast Classic has one of the better fields of the early-season tournaments. Here is a preview of the NCAA Basketball event that takes place in Niceville, Florida.
Eight NCAA Basketball teams take part in the Emerald Coast Classic, a holiday tournament that has been taking place in Florida since 2014. In this tournament, first and second-round games are played on campus while the third and championship rounds are played on the campus of Northwest Florida State College. This year the eight teams participating are Chicago State, Jacksonville State, Chattanooga, Alabama State, Purdue, VCU, Tennessee, and Florida State.
On-campus games will run from Nov. 16-25, with Jacksonville State facing Chicago State and the Hornets of Alabama State taking on Chattanooga in one bracket, with Florida State facing Tennessee and VCU and Purdue going at it in the other on Black Friday, with the winners and losers concluding the tournament the next day.
As I said, this is just the sixth year for this tournament, but it seems as though the Emerald Coast Classic can be very indicative of a team’s chances to make the NCAA Tournament. In the previous five seasons, only four times has a bracket winner failed to make Big Dance, with one of those being last season when Nicholls State won their bracket but didn’t qualify for the Southland tournament.
The brackets for this year’s tournament are interesting, in one, you’ve got three teams, Florida State, VCU and Purdue that are top-25 worthy and another in Tennessee coming off a run to the Sweet Sixteen. The other bracket, while the teams may not seem all that relevant, all four have won conference tournaments within the last decade and three of them have NCAA Tournament appearances (Chicago State won the Great West in 2013 but the conference was not eligible to send its champion to the tournament, instead they went to the CIT).