“To play this at this time of the year, I’m not for it,” Cal said. “The league is good enough that we don’t need something in the middle of our league that takes us away from league play to prove how good we are or not. I don’t think, other than a tough game in the middle of your league schedule, it serves as anything.”
Cal said when he was at Memphis and UMass, his teams needed events like this to boost their resumes because their conferences were so weak, like SEC Basketball was when the SEC/Big 12 Challenge was created in 2013; now that the league is sending eight teams to the NCAA Tournament, that’s no longer the case.