College basketball is underway, which means every office park, every middle school lunch line, and every holding cell at the county jail is abuzz with the same question:
Who’s going to win the 2026 NIT?
We’ve got 26 thoughts. And for our loyal readers, we’ve got an update at the end on what to expect from The Barking Crow this basketball season.
1. VCU is the preseason NIT favorite.
Too much too soon for Phil Martelli Jr.? In 1996, Phil Martelli Sr. took over as head coach of the Saint Joseph’s Hawks and immediately led the university on its deepest NIT run ever. It can happen, and VCU has just the roster, just the amount of national respect, and just the amount of self-respect necessary to pull it off (medium, medium, and high, in order).
2. Our friends aren’t going anywhere.
Chattanooga’s in prime position to make the NIT again, preseason favorites in the SoCon (according to us, but also according to some others!) but not preseason favorites by much (according to the others—we think they win it by ten games). North Texas is undergoing a changing of the guard and guards, but that athletic department knows what it’s doing, and what it’s doing is challenging for NIT titles. UC Irvine? It goes without saying. They’re in the mix. Add in the Schertz-Avila kingdom over at SLU, a UAB program that cannot be crushed, and a potentially resurgent Seton Hall, and you can fire up Thin Lizzy. “Spread the word around.”
3. The Atlantic 10 is good.
To be clear, I don’t mean “good” as in “good at basketball” in any traditional sense. If you asked me to bet my life on any single A-10 team to win any single game, I would ask how you were planning to kill me and whether I could choose exile instead. But hot damn, is this league full of contenders. Even as I write this, St. Bonaventure has coughed off a double-digit lead and come back from multiple possessions down against Bradley in a game in Rock Hill, South Carolina being broadcast on YouTube dot com. I will join the Atlantic 10 in its mudbath. I will drink the Atlantic 10’s mud. I will piss mud out of my pisshole as an act of my love for the Atlantic 10 Men’s Basketball Conference Which is 13 Teams Large and Also Includes La Salle.
4. I don’t know what’s going to happen with NIT opt-outs.
We’re not going to ignore them. We’re on a war footing right now. Our opponents? Apathy, the NCAA T*urnament, the College Basketball Crown, and maybe Rob Lowe. (I’m keeping an eye on him.)
You can love college basketball and also admit it kind of sucks right now, at least among high-majors and prodigal NIT children like Memphis. 2024 was bleak in the NIT opt-out arena, and 2025 was bleaker still. Some of that was due to the Crown, which is thankfully dying and which we’ll address next, but the trend is bad. For a lot of college basketball programs, teams are currently a one-year construct. There’s not a lot of developing talent. There’s not a lot of loyalty to one another or to the name on the front of the jersey. This is slightly unrelated, but the obsession with the NCAA T*urnament has also cannibalized the regular season. It’s a mess. We can get through it and love college basketball all the while, but it is a mess.
5. The Crown is dying its well-deserved death.
The Crown is down to eight teams: Two apiece from the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten, and two wildcards. It sucks that it still exists, but after a year of near-zero attendance and terrible ratings (they put Nebraska on network television on a Sunday afternoon and couldn’t even get a million people to watch), the writing’s on the wall. America doesn’t like crowns, guys.
6. Saint Mary’s has the coolest schedule in the country.
The WCC regular season schedule isn’t as fun this year (we need Thursday hoops) but Saint Mary’s managed to pack nine fun mid-majors and the Battle 4 Atlantis into their nonconference slate. They’re making most of them come to Moraga, but what college basketball appreciator doesn’t want to visit Moraga? That’s the litmus test of whether someone likes college basketball or likes the idea of liking college basketball. Do they want to someday make a trip to see Saint Mary’s in person?
7. College basketball media needs to trust the fans more.
While we’re on the WCC: There’s going to be a lot of “YOU SHOULD WEEP ABOUT THIS” aimed at us all during WCC Tournament week, Gonzaga’s last in the storied conference. We’ll weep, ok? Just let us weep in our own way. Stop telling us how to feel about everything. We know college basketball too, alright?
8. ACC Basketball is still on The CW, and it begins this Saturday.
Duke vs. Western Carolina doesn’t feel like ACC Basketball on The CW, but that’s all the more reason to tune in. At this point, I trust The CW to make it exciting. Did you see ACC Football on The CW on Saturday? That was electric!
9. SEC Basketball is still on ESPN, and it begins tonight on TNT.
No, Florida vs. Arizona is not on the ESPN Family of Networks. But the SEC will be, and you can set your clock on it being fun again this year. People like to rip on Greg Sankey, but in every single sport, the SEC is a really fun conference to follow.
Side note: With every passing day, I understand these neutral-site Las Vegas games less. I understand neutral sites, but why is it always Las Vegas? 95% of the time, attendance there is awful. And it’s not like TV ratings depend on where a game is being held. Someone explain this to me. Someone who knows, if you’re reading this, please tell me what’s going on.
10. The Big East could be great fun.
Dan Hurley vs. Rick Pitino with the only two teams in the conference who are definitely good? Run the table, both of you.
11. The Big East could be annoying as hell.
Dan Hurley vs. Rick Pitino with the two best teams in the conference but not necessarily great teams? We’re going to get gaslit into thinking these guys are national contenders, aren’t we.
12. The Big Ten cares too much about TV and not enough about sports.
In three months, a Big Ten coach is going to complain about a 9:30 PM local tipoff on a Monday night three time zones from home, and a bunch of you will scramble to your smartphones to yell, “BUT YOU MAKE A LOT OF MONEY!” The league could still make a lot of money while taking care of its teams. Also, I feel like the thing the coaches are saying is usually exactly your point: They want a league better built for competition, and they’d probably be willing to trade some money for it.
13. I don’t believe this, but if anyone wants a take, the Big Ten stinks in March because of the TV obsession.
This won’t hold up under any scrutiny, but it doesn’t need to. We can get a lot of Midwestern men to say, “Maybe our teams wouldn’t suck in the NCAA T*urnament if the league stopped making them take redeyes on Wednesdays!”
Tired athletes in January make for bad athletes in March, Big Ten. Check and mate.
14. Oklahoma State will be the surprise story of this college basketball season, and not because of that exhibition game against Auburn.
It’ll be because they played in last year’s NIT. Big Nutz Lutz over there caring about his fans and not letting Brett Yormark drag him to Las Vegas at the end of college basketball’s greatest month.
15. Oh shit, that’s right. Grand Canyon’s in the Mountain West now.
We will all say this 26 times this year. It won’t feel normal, even by the end of the season.
16. Boise State is running dangerously low on white guys with moppy hair.
We’ve long missed Max Rice. Now Tyson Degenhart’s gone too. RJ Keene, quick! Make your hair a little thicker and grow a little bit more of it than you can control!
17. Bryan Hodgson’s going to do well enough in his first year at South Florida to make a lot of college basketball writers try to draw comparisons between his success and the football program’s. It won’t be enough to make the football world say a word.
The college basketball universe makes a lot more sense if you think of it as one big attempt to get football to notice us.
18. The gambling scandal won’t be that big.
There are going to be three or four weekday mornings over the next five months where you’re promised some college basketball gambling bombshell, and in each case you will have forgotten about it by the time you finish your lunch.
19. Drake is going to be better than both Indiana (DeVries Family) and Iowa (Ben McCollum).
Putting this in writing just in case. It’s worth a shot.
20. This is the year the Summit League breaks through.
Omaha held onto Chris Crutchfield. St. Thomas held onto Johnny Tauer. South Dakota State is hard to keep away from relevance. They will find us another Eaglestaff. Even better than the last one.
21. I don’t know why this has turned into so many predictions. I meant this to be observations and thoughts.
Whoops!
22. What if the teams between 67th and 78th on kenpom made a conference?
TCU. West Virginia. Syracuse. Oklahoma State. Georgia Tech. Virginia Tech. Butler. Minnesota. Utah. Arizona State. Miami. Notre Dame. DePaul.
This is what the NIT should be. This is what the Crown is trying to take from you. Death to tyrants!!!!!
23. I appreciate that the Field of 68 put this opening day set of games together, but it’s also making me sad.
The neutral-site 8 AM game on YouTube was a valiant effort, but it’s just not the same as when ESPN used to do the marathon. I’m sorry! I don’t want to dwell on the past either! But we lost something, guys. We lost something.
And it’s time to get it back.
Free the NIT!
24. Either Sean Miller is secretly a great coach or Chris Del Conte made his first mistake as Texas athletic director.
I meant to include this in our SEC section, but alas, word processing technology has not advanced enough to let me simply move it back there now.
Sean Miller isn’t a very good coach, right? Nothing against the guy, but he’s usually a little worse than his predecessors and successors? That’s his bit? Gets good jobs, doesn’t do as well as the last guy or the next guy?
I will attend Texas basketball games this year but it will largely be to watch the other team.
25. I don’t actually hope this but a piece of me hopes Will Wade kills a guy.
Not in a bad way. In an organized crime way. And then he’ll get fired and three years later killing people will be fine if you do it as part of organized crime and McNeese will run the whole thing back.
Again, I don’t actually hope this happens.
But what a story it’d be!
26. Free Hoops might come back in January, NIT Bracketology should be up later this month, and we’ll go from there.
Update on the state of The Barking Crow: We’ve been all over the place this college football season because the kid keeps getting sick and he routinely then gets us sick (the blog is the first thing that gets hit, because my wife has a more serious job than NIT Blogger/FCS Bracketologist/Joe Kelly Rememberer), but while we’re still not making enough money to keep the blog’s lights on, we’re making a little? And the numbers are going up? More to come. Still trying to figure out if I can legally sell NIT War Bonds.
Anyway, this still might be the last year of The Barking Crow, and there’s even a small chance we shut down completely after the holidays. We’ll probably make it to Indianapolis in April. What that looks like remains to be determined.
BONUS THOUGHT. The potentially expanded NCAA T*urnament might be good at making the regular season more meaningful again. That’s an underrated problem in college basketball, and making the 1–4 seeds of even that dastardly NCAA T*urnament more valuable could go a long way towards fixing it. I hate expansion on principle and also out of solidarity with those of you still enamored with the NCAA T*urnament’s false charms. But that could be a silver lining. Just putting it out there. I’m gonna go eat lunch and watch Omaha play Murray State now. It’s tortellini day in my kitchen. (Most days are tortellini day in my kitchen.)
**
