The NIT Final Four is upon us.
The Schedule
There are three games in the NIT Final Four. This is confusing, because it’s called the NIT Final Four. There used to be four games, but they got rid of the third-place one. Now there’s just a first-place one and two games to get to the first-place one. They brought the third-place game back for a year, but now it’s gone again. Nobody has told me why or how they do this, or who makes the decision. I’m considering adopting a disguise and infiltrating the NCAA to find the answers. If this blog goes silent, it’s either that or I tanked my credit score and am re-entering the corporate world right back at square one.
There are three games in the NIT Final Four. If you would like the most confusing explanation of how those three games are structured, please refer to the last paragraph. If you would like a more conventional explanation: There are two semifinals and then there is a championship.
The first semifinal is tonight at 7:00 PM EDT. It will be broadcast on ESPN. It is being played between Wisconsin and North Texas. Do not worry about who those teams are. We’ll explain that in the next section.
The second semifinal is tonight at approximately 9:30 PM EDT. It will be broadcast on ESPN2, because it is the 2nd semifinal. It will feature Utah Valley and UAB. Do worry about those teams. Especially Utah Valley. More to come on that.
Why is the time of the second semifinal approximate? Well, we don’t know how long the first game will take. Baseball has a big fat head about being the only sport where you don’t know how long the games go, but though it successfully edged golf and cricket and Risk out of that conversation for years, replay review has inserted college basketball into the midst of it. Nice try, baseball. Your originality has been defeated by Roger Ayers showing the camera his hairline’s good side.
Now—and this part is important, so turn off the NIT preview podcast you’re listening to—someone will win each of those semifinal games. Each of those games will have exactly one winner. Those winners? If you guessed that they’ll play each other in the NIT Championship, you guessed correctly. That’s on Thursday, at 9:30 PM EDT, and it’ll be broadcast on ESPN2. Why am I writing EDT instead of EST? Because it’s EDT right now and I’m a daylight savings time pedant. But enough about me. Let’s talk about the guys on the court (and on the sideline [and not on the sideline]).
The Teams
It has been said of North Texas that they make basketball look difficult for everybody on the court, including themselves. An institution known for its music school, located in Denton, Texas—where tree-lined streets mark the end of Fort Worth’s suburbia—North Texas plays in Conference USA, but it’s on its way to the American Athletic Conference. Its teams are known as the Mean Green, and its mascot is an eagle.
North Texas has been good for three or four years now, and they’re the best this year they’ve ever been. They beat Purdue in the NCA* *********t back when beating Purdue in that was original. They made last year’s NIT and played two thrillers. This season, they’ve won NIT games in a variety of ways. They kicked the piss out of Sam Houston State in the second round. They seesawed past Oklahoma State in overtime last week to get here.
When North Texas is clicking, they’re hitting threes and Tylor Perry is usually walking on water. Perry, a man with the legs of Jalen Hurts and the jump shot of Jimmy Chitwood and the body control of Ozzie Smith, is a big deal on this North Texas team. He’s far from the lone star—Kai Huntsberry is always creating, Rubin Jones had a great game against Sam Houston, Moulaye Sissoko came up big in Stillwater—but he’s the face of the team on the court.
The face of the team on the sideline is Grant McCasland, Coach Mac. A former walk-on point guard at Baylor, McCasland is clear, lucid energy. Nearly a Texas lifer, the Irving High graduate and former head man at Midland College in the junior college world and Midwestern State in the Division II world has built something special in Denton, but there’s an expectation around college basketball that once this season ends, win or lose, he’s going to be the new head coach in Lubbock, where he was Director of Operations after graduating Baylor and earned a master’s degree. The speculation has gone silent in recent days, but the thought is that that’s how we know it’s true. We’re likely seeing Coach Mac’s final days at North Texas.
Already missing for the Mean Green, in all likelihood, is Abou Ousmane, the team’s go-to big man and highest-usage player while he was on the court this year. Ousmane is, per North Texas, tending to a family situation, and we share in the hopes of many that everything’s alright.
When North Texas isn’t clicking, the shots aren’t falling, and the slowest-paced team in the country can get into some bad situations. Against UAB in the Conference USA tournament, the Mean Green trailed early by a score of 22 to 2. They rallied to make it interesting, but the hole was a disaster. That’s the risk for these guys heading into the game against Wisconsin tonight.
I was prepared to not like this Wisconsin team. Early impressions weren’t great. But the more you get to know them, the more earnest you realize they are, and as is the case with just about every team that makes the NIT Final Four, these guys are excited every day to play basketball, which can’t be said about a lot of players and programs in this day and age.
Admittedly, I’m a Wisconsin sympathizer, and I say that to get everything out in the open. I’m also a North Texas sympathizer, and after yesterday a bit of a UAB sympathizer, and I’m not at all against Utah Valley. But my loyalty to Wisconsin runs the deepest of the four. Not that I’m a Wisconsin fan or anything, but if you live in Minneapolis for two years and hang out with Minnesota fans and also Wisconsin fans, you will generally gravitate toward the Wisconsin fans. They’re just more fun.
Part of the charm of the University of Wisconsin–Madison is that it’s the big school in the state. There is not another FBS school within Wisconsin’s borders. As such, Wisconsin is more or less the Packers of college sports. It’s a little diluted by Minnesotans and Illinoisans, but the Packers are the closest thing we have to the Wisconsin Badgers, so we’re going to use that comparison. Also of note, for those not from Big Ten Country (I grew up just across the border from Lake Geneva, which is to say I grew up in Illinois): Wisconsin and Indiana are in a tight race to be the Big Ten school you’d most like to hang out with, and there’s a decent gap before you get to the battle for third. It’s a smart, fun school that doesn’t take itself too seriously. This is why we sympathize. (Also, they’ve gotten close to a lot of things but they haven’t gotten their cigars, and that goes a long way towards keeping everything tolerable.)
On the court, Wisconsin plays clean basketball. Fairly slow, pretty under control, strong defense but not a lot of fouls. They protect the ball better than anyone in the nation, not adjusting for schedule, and they played a tough, tough schedule. They’re best when Tyler Wahl’s on the floor, but their rotation is balanced, from Wisconsin-native-turned-Wofford-transfer Max Klesmit, on par with Chucky Hepburn when it comes to shooting, to freshman guard Connor Essegian, rosy cheeked and ready to comment on every Instagram.
The Badgers are coached by Greg Gard, a man having way more fun than it looks like he’s having during games. A sneaky goofball, Greg Gard is.
Gard’s recent tenure at Wisconsin’s been rocky, with the last two things under “Coaching Career” on his Wikipedia page the leaked recording scandal (a recording of 2021 seniors directly criticizing Gard in a private meeting for his lack of personal connection to them was released to the Wisconsin State Journal and on YouTube) and the incident in which Juwan Howard struck a man because Gard called two late timeouts and Juwan Howard was grumpy. Not on the Wikipedia page is the Kobe King scandal in which the highly touted La Crosse product left the team in the middle of the 2020 season, blamed his departure on his relationship with Gard, and revealed that a racial slur had been used by a strength coach (who resigned soon after). Also not on the Wikipedia page is the Wisconsin fanbase’s frustrations with this season, where some have criticized Gard for not doing enough in the transfer portal (he did bring in Klesmit). Even with all this going on (the Juwan Howard thing is not a Greg Gard story, let’s be clear), Wisconsin has the highest single-game attendance of any game this NIT, comfortably topping 10,000 when Liberty was in Madison for the second round. They also send what’s likely to be the biggest official traveling party outside of possibly Utah Valley’s, which has a major proximity advantage. We’re going to see a lot of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin probably doesn’t have the talent edge here in Las Vegas. They’re talented, but they’re a developmental program and everyone on this team has eligibility left, which points towards more development waiting to happen. When they win, it’s not all that pretty, but that’s what it means to be a defense-first team. When they lose, it’s often rather close. It’s hard to get too far from the Badgers in either direction. Most of the time, we call this “playing to the level of your competition.” Again, though, this team has weirdly grown on me.
In the second game, UAB has the strongest collection of Dudes of any team in the field. The most guys who’ll make you whistle and say, “Damn.” Jelly Walker is a cult hero. Trey Jemison is a joyous giant with a fervent desire to obliterate rims. Ty Brewer and KJ Buffen are no strangers to the practice of getting buckets. Tony Toney is great based on name alone. This is an inexhaustive list.
UAB has a smaller undergraduate enrollment than is normal for a state school of its athletic stature. The big thing at UAB is its med school. The other big thing? Its basketball. Andy Kennedy—head coach and sage—spoke on this yesterday at the UAB press conference, but UAB basketball is a remarkable story. Athletics began at UAB with men’s hoops, somehow taking John Wooden’s successor from UCLA to be its first head coach as well as its athletic director. That coach and AD, Gene Bartow, is the namesake of UAB’s arena, and his success at UAB is the stuff of legend, peaking—of course—with two NIT Final Four appearances, the first of which came with Kennedy on the team.
Kennedy is only 55, but he isn’t exactly an up-and-comer in the coaching ranks. The guy spent twelve years at Mississippi (yes, he was the coach there during the Marshall Henderson years, and he made two NIT Final Fours during that time), coached before that for a season as the post-Huggins interim at Cincinnati, and spent two years with SEC Network and ESPN. Maybe it’s just I who get an air of stoic gratitude from Kennedy, but it would match the biography.
UAB’s season was an odd one, five of its nine losses coming in a six-game stretch in which Walker missed time with a nagging ankle injury. It’s unclear how indicative that stretch was, but it was a long time ago now, and over the last two months the Blazers have only lost to North Texas and FAU, the former defeat coming in a two-overtime affair in Denton. When the Blazers win, they’re often bullying teams with their talent and their athleticism and their willingness to attack the boards. When they lose, it’s usually that either too many players have gone cold or the defensive part isn’t happening. FAU killed them on rebounding a few weeks ago. North Texas did the same and overwhelmed them at the free throw line in February.
Utah Valley is the darling of the tournament, but they weren’t far from being seeded. The playmaking ability and mind-bending athleticism gets the attention, and that’s certainly what stands out when you watch this team live, but the calling card through their WAC championship season was their defense. Few teams in the country have made teams miss more shots than Utah Valley.
A junior college until recently, Utah Valley first awarded four-year degrees in 1993. Now, it enrolls 40,000 students. In 2003, they joined Division I, and they’ve worked their way up from independent status through the Great West Conference to where they are today. It’s a classic high-octane success story, and it probably does speak to Utah’s industriousness as a culture. The school’s in Orem, which blurs into Provo.
Every university president, for the most part, has a heck of a CV, but Astrid Tuminez—Utah Valley’s president—has a wild one. Born in poverty in the Philippines, Tuminez made it to BYU and worked her way through to a master’s degree at Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT. She’s worked on peace negotiations in the Philippines, worked in Filipino banking and Singaporean education, and speaks six languages fluently. She will likely be in attendance tonight with her trademark pom poms.
We don’t know who UVU’s coach is right now. Mark Madsen—yes, the Mark Madsen from the Lakers—isn’t in Las Vegas, as far as we know. It was said last week that he wouldn’t be here as his wife is either imminently expecting or there is, God willing, another Madsen in the world. Adding a complication, though, Madsen is also involved in some expectations. He’s expected to get the Cal job. Funny how all these schools are hiring coaches in the NIT Final Four.
Todd Phillips is the associate head coach in Orem, and he took the questions from the coach’s seat in yesterday’s presser. We don’t know much more than that.
Something Utah Valley does as well as anyone in the country is exploit opponents when said opponents don’t get back quickly enough on defense. The Wolverines have a knack for getting behind the coverage, to use football terminology, and it really does feel like they’re running skinny posts. Against Cincinnati in the quarterfinals, the audacity of a few alley-oops was stunning. Trey Woodbury, Justin Harmon, and Aziz Bandaogo are the key playmakers, but Tim Fuller’s offensive efficiency (credit to KenPom and EvanMiya for stats and info in here, by the way) is hard to beat in all of Division I. This team is kind of like that 2013 FGCU team in terms of its excitement value, except—and I say this on numbers, without a shred of NIT-tinted glasses—that this team is a lot better.
How to beat them? Sometimes, the aggressive style becomes too much. Utah Valley turned it over on more than twenty percent of possessions against Southern Utah in their WAC Tournament exit. Tarleton elicited a similar performance a few weeks earlier, compounded by inefficient shooting. Utah Valley is the most volatile of these four teams. That’s what makes them so fun.
The Venue
For the second time in three years and also the second time in history, the NIT Final Four is not being held at Madison Square Garden. Honestly? It’s kind of sad.
KIND OF SAD THAT MSG COULDN’T CONTAIN THE NIT’S EXCITEMENT!
There’s a lot of sadness about the change, and that’s fair: The NIT at MSG was a tradition. But sometimes, you have to try new things. MSG will be there.
Orleans Arena hosts this season, and if you’ve never been, Orleans Arena is a twenty-year-old arena built adjacent to a 27-year-old hotel and casino that feels a lot older than 27. It’s a ways off the Strip, but it sure loves hosting basketball, and who can blame it? Las Vegas has a lot of cachet. The Orleans Arena is doing its best to build that even higher.
The Color Commentator
If you’re watching at home, you’ll get to enjoy Fran Fraschilla as he approaches the peak of his hype as a color commentator. A former NIT appearing coach himself, and someone who’s long been active around the NIT, Fraschilla has become a quiet sensation among the people who watch a ton of college basketball this year, which means he’s going to become a sensation next year among those who watch a conventional amount of college hoops. I don’t know how his knowledge of these teams could compare to what he knows about every squad in the Big 12, but he’s going to do his homework, and he’s going to bring a lot of positivity and enthusiasm. Should be a fun watch.
The Stakes
Everything. It’s the NIT Final Four. It’s not, I don’t know, some illegitimate tournament sent to imitate the NIT.
To answer your question, though, yes: The Barking Crow recognizes NIT winners as national champions. And one of these years, we’re going to get an extra trophy that’s so expensive the IRS thinks we’re using it as a vehicle to launder money. I even passed a trophy shop yesterday. I thought about it. It wasn’t in the budget (unless the NIT Bracket Challenge’s Roulette Tiebreaker makes me millions), but I thought about it.
Bona NIT, friends.
Bona NIT.
