I have often thought of ways to introduce early season tournaments to start the season and I have come up with an idea. This would need to have 1 small adjustment to begin. One of your teams "off" days would be needed before the season starts (this would actually combine with your 2 exhibition slots and would result in 3 games if you participated in a tournament). I would like to see the other "off" day universally placed the day after the non-conference games have finished. I have listed the tournament details below:

• The CTOC (Champions Tip-off Classic) - This tournament is automatically scheduled to start the season using the top 8 ranked teams (when the rankings are 1st released) with no more than 1 team selected per conference (if 2 teams were ranked in the top 8 AND were in the same conference, only the highest ranked team would be in this tournament). These 8 teams would be seeded 1-8 (with 1 playing 8 and so on....) on day 1. On day 2, (2nd slot of schedule) the semi-finals are played in both the winning bracket and losers bracket. On Day 3, The championship game will, the 3rd/4th place game will play, along with the 5th/6th place game and the 7th/8th place game giving all 8 tournament teams their 1st 3 games of the season (these 8 teams will not be allowed to have exhibition games).
• The Maui Invitational - After the 8 teams for the CTOC have been selected, the system will send "invitations" to the top 8 remaining teams using the same system (no more than team per conference invited). The system will send 3 sets of 8 invitations (Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3) for a total of 24 invitations (again no more than 1 team per conference will be invited). Teams will have 24 hours to accept/decline their "invitation". If all 8 tier 1 teams accept, all other invitations are automatically withdrawn. Any Tier 1 invitation that is declined, will be filled by the tier 2 invitation for that slot (Slot 1 will have a T1,T2 and T3 invite). If any tier 2 invite is declined, it will be filled by the tier 3 invite AUTOMATICALLY (tier 3 invites will not have the accept/decline option). Any Tier 1 or Tier 2 invitations not accepted/declined by the deadline will be automatically "declined". This tournament will run in the same fashion as the CTOC (once 8 teams have been selected, they will be seeded 1-8 and play consolation games on all 3 days).
• The LVL (Las Vegas Lottery) - After the 16 teams have been selected for the top 2 tournaments, the LVL will randomly draw 8 teams (no more than 1 per conference) from the remaining teams.They will play in the same format as above and all 3 tournaments will run simultaneously (in slots 1, 2 and 3 of the season).
• Any team not playing in a tournament may use these 3 days to schedule exhibition games (yes 3 exhibition games if you wish).

I think I have everything covered and would love to hear opinions of this idea (even negative ones). Let me know what you think!

In these tournaments, you my ask about teams playing a team that they might already have scheduled for their non-conference thus playing them twice in the year. To prevent this, the system will select team 1, then select team 2 (remembering that only 1 team from any given conference can be selected). Team 2 will then be compared to team 1's non-conference schedule. If team 2 is not on team 1's schedule, then team 2 will be officially selected. If team 2 happens to be on team 1's schedule then this team is not selected and a new team 2 is chosen. The next step would be for the system to select team 3. Team 3 would then be compared against teams 1 and 2 non-conference schedule and selected in the same manner. All 8 teams would be selected in this manner.

I love the idea of pre-season tournaments, and while I like this idea, I would only like it if everyone gets to schedule games during this time. Maybe accomplish this by allowing teams to schedule week 1-3 and if they're invited to a tournament then those games don't get played, otherwise they're played like normal. Off-season already feels ridiculously long if you're rebuilding, and I don't think those teams should be further punished by waiting another 3 days.

Pretty good idea, in theory. Maybe difficult to alter the formatting from a programming end, but this would be a worthy consideration for the next big update (3.5? 4.0?).

Are these exhibition games that are played for bragging rights (and maybe a cool medallion to be placed on the coaching page perhaps) or are they non conference games that would count towards things such as RPI?

I think this is a really cool idea, just asking for clarification.