'Proving Ourselves Was the Biggest Challenge'

Jon Mugar was in Los Angeles working for the TV network Adult Swim when he texted a long-time friend a hypothetical on a Sunday afternoon.

“What would happen if you put $50 million on the table and invited any basketball team in the world to play for it? Would the Lakers or Duke enter?”, Mugar asked.

The concept became an obsession for Mugar.

Over the coming months, he would flesh it out on a five-page document and begin seeking feedback from friends and family on its flaws.

More than a decade later, Mugar’s “The Basketball Tournament” (TBT) is a major summer hit on ESPN — and tips off its 10th season this coming week.

The Daily Coach caught up with Mugar recently to discuss his dramatic career shift, winning over skeptics as a leader, and the importance of having a distinguishing element to a business.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Jon, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us a little about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

I grew up in the Boston area loving sports and Saturday Night Live. It was very left brain, right brain. I went through high school and college at Tufts University playing basketball and baseball for four years.

My family was also in business for a long time. My father put on the July 4 celebration on the esplanade in Boston every year. I worked that handing out free trash bags starting when I was 5 years old.

My dream job was always writing for Saturday Night Live. I graduated from Tufts and caught wind of the Second City out in Chicago, which I knew from Bill Murray and Chris Farley. I moved out there without ever having been before and went through the Second City training center. I did some writing and directing for almost three years, then I moved out to California to work for Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim on Adult Swim. I did that for about seven years.

You’re heavily into your TV career when you come up with the idea for the TBT. How did you flesh it out?

It really became an obsession and an interesting idea to explore, so on off days, I’d go to a coffee shop and write the concept out. I started pitching it around to people I knew.

At that point, you’re just looking for people to poke holes in the idea and help you improve it. I went to people closest to me first and got their feedback and started going into the sports-business world. I played baseball at Tufts with someone named Cory Dolich, whose dad had been president of the Grizzlies and a head of marketing for the Oakland A’s. I also had a friend who was a lawyer who knew someone high up at ESPN for a long time, and I also knew someone who knew the head of sports sponsorship at Anheuser-Busch. I ultimately got to those three people with this concept.

What type of feedback were you getting and was any of it discouraging? 

I think the premise of an open, high-stakes, massive sporting event is appealing to everyone. The only shortfall was frankly me coming from my background. I’d never done anything remotely similar to this. I’m not a salesperson by nature. I’d have to hone the pitch and prepare it.

You get feedback early on that it’s not possible because “It’s never been done before” or “That’s just not the way we do things.” Feedback like that is just rooted in historical precedent and is challenging to overcome. It’s not very common you find a lot of developmental mindsets in sports where people are looking at new rule sets or new formats. That was a big challenge. “Who is this guy?” “How can they pull this off?” Proving ourselves was the biggest challenge.

How did you get skeptics to be more open minded about your idea?

We took it out for about for about two years talking to different people, different broadcast networks and sponsors, and we finally got to this point where we said, “Let’s just put it on ourselves to prove that we have at least an operational capacity and are trustworthy people who can put on a high-quality event with players as good as we think.”

With friends and family money, we put $500K on the table and said anyone in the world can come and play for it. We took 32 teams in early June in Philadelphia in 2014 announced it to (then-Grantland writer) Zach Lowe, who wrote an article on it. We launched the website right when it dropped and got a ton of teams to apply. The first game on the first morning was at 8 a.m., and right away you could see there was this incredible market of high-level players who look like they’re playing NBA basketball. From that point on, we got the attention of ESPN and others, and it went from there.

You really differentiate yourselves with the “Elam Ending” and how your games finish. In the last few minutes, the clock turns off and they’re played to a final score. How did that idea come about?

It was 2016, three days after our championship. We got an email from a guy named Nick Elam that was a 67-page PowerPoint deck. I was pretty checked out at that point on vacation relaxing and ready to dismiss it. But it was a perfectly punctuated cover letter, and I went through it, and it laid out a very compelling argument.

This was addressing an issue at a really good time for us, and that began a nine-month journey of developing the concept with Nick. We worked with our referees to put it in the playoff format a year after. It went so well that we ultimately put it into our games in 2018. Our part owner, (NBA star) Chris Paul, was essential in getting it into the NBA All-Star game in Chicago in 2020, which was one of the best moments of my life. It’s a huge thing for us to have that be a differentiator and innovator and be someone who can shepherd these new ideas into a sport like basketball.

What do you think the larger implications are of the “Elam Ending” for an upstart business looking to distinguish itself?

When you’re a challenger brand like we are or any small business is, it’s your responsibility, in my opinion, to innovate and create new things. The NBA is so popular it had very little incentive to innovate. NCAA, same way. So who is it going to be up to to come in and challenge the status quo or a ruleset or a precedent? It’s really on the young upstart small business.

The way we do our postgame celebration, the way we have teams go over to a large bracket and place their placard on the next round, has now gone to places like college football’s National Championship. We don’t monetize that, but it’s very fulfilling to see good ideas like that that are ours or from fans ripple through all of sports. We have the incentive to take risks because the other properties don’t.

You also pulled off the tournament in the summer of 2020 during the height of COVID-19. What went in to making that work and what leadership challenges did you have to navigate?

Everything got so level in mid-March of 2020. When you’re a small business that’s used to identifying obstacles and figuring out ways to overcome them, you’re very well-suited for that environment.

We broke down the problem and the way we would get through it. Once testing became available in mid-June, we knew the way forward would be through developing a lock-tight health-and-safety plan and putting on a very contained version of our tournament over 14 days in Ohio. Obviously that came with huge challenges. The governor’s office tried to shut us down the night before games and said we might not be able to play at all. We had to talk our way out of that. There’s no shortage of obstacles we had to overcome, but ultimately, we had a great plan. We didn’t have any precedent or any model to work from, but after our event, a lot of groups reached out to us asking how we did it. It was a great opportunity for us from a leadership position.

You’ve obviously had tremendous success over the last decade, but is there one piece of advice you’d give yourself looking back on everything?

It took two years to get the idea off the ground. If I went back, I would’ve gone about it differently and done our tournament earlier. I would’ve gone out with a half-a-million dollar, winner-take-all concept to give our team that experience and put the idea out there.

I think my viewpoint was that everything had to be perfect and lined up and you had to have the right broadcast partner and sponsor partners and it’d all come together. But the reality is you really have to go first and lead this group of people through that. I would’ve tried to be less perfect in the launch of the idea and just get into it and start learning on the fly.

Q&A Resources

Jon Mugar ― Twitter | The Tournament