Dr. Don & Super Goph, great idea
I like your thinking. . .how bout this, an Upper Midwest tournament? You could draw in D-1 teams from the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri.
For example, let's say you set up an eight team tournament, with each team guaranteed three games (or you could go smaller and do a round robin six team tournament, or a smaller four team, two game tournament). From each of the neighboring states, you could extract major conference or mid major conferences of D-I non-Big Ten teams (save for the Dakotas). For instance:
South Dakota-USD or SDSU
North Dakota-UND or NDSU
Wisconsin-(major conference)Marquette(mid conference)UW-Green Bay, UW-Milwaukee
Iowa-(major conference)Iowa State(mid conference)Northern Iowa
Nebraska-(major conference)Nebraska(mid conference)Creighton
Illinois-(mid conference)Southern Illinois, Illinois-Chicago, Eastern Illinois, Northern Illinois)
Ohio-(major conference)Xavier, Dayton, Cincinnati(mid conference)Cleveland State, Toledo
Anyway, you get the idea without me having to go through the other states. So, let's say you set up this tournament, with these reps, four major conference teams, four mid conference teams:
Minnesota-The Gophers
North Dakota-NDSU
South Dakota-USD
Wisconsin-Marquette
Iowa-Iowa State
Ohio-Xavier
Illinois-Southern Illinois
Indiana-Ball State
You have seven different conferences (one independent) represented, so you don't have to worry about conference teams playing each other early (Big Ten, Summit, Big East, Big 12, Atlantic 10, Missouri Valley, and MAC). You could match up the brackets as such:
Top bracket:
Minnesota vs. NDSU
Iowa State vs. Ball State
Lower bracket:
Marquette vs. USD
jXavier vs. Southern Illinois
The winners of the first game in each bracket move forward; the losers play each other. Who wouldn't want to watch those games? Predicting this year's games, you'd see Minnesota vs. Iowa State in round 2, with Marquette vs. Xavier in the lower bracket. A championship game between the Gophers and either Marquette or Xavier would be alright, wouldn't it?
And the thing is, you could rotate in the Missouris, Kansases, Kansas States various years too. Instead of looking at a holiday tournament, how bout an opening weekend tournament, like we had this year? My reasoning is, the Gophers wouldn't want to tie up their Thanksgiving weekend when the possibility of Maui or Old Spice or Anaheim could come calling.
But a nice little opening weekend tournament would bring some excitement and attention to the Gophers right away, you'd likely get a nice cross section of fans from the neighboring universities, and everyone would be happy with boosting their RPIs in this neutral site. For the Gopher fans, it would be a nice way to roll one of the lesser regular opponents (SDSU, NDSU, etc.) onto the schedule too.
Alright, let's make it happen people! And if this is too much, well, you can't tell me that a simple little four team tournament representing the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin can't happen.