Every NIT is an NIT, and so every NIT is a good NIT. This probably sounds like something I don’t mean, like when a guy picks up that his fiancée really wants him to post on Instagram about wedding planning so he saves five pictures she texted him and scrambles together some meaningless, pleasant verbiage. I mean this, though. World Series are good or bad depending on the teams in them and the drama within their seven games. The NIT? The great thing about the NIT—and disturbed though they are, I think NCAA T*urnament diehards would say this about their own favorite tournament—is that its status comes not from Seton Hall or Indiana State or North Texas, but from itself. The NIT is the NIT because it’s the NIT. You’re nodding.
This year’s is a unique NIT. We’re evidently deeper into the opt-out era than anyone had hoped, but the situation isn’t bad. It’s just weird. For years, the NIT’s depended on a yin and a yang. On one side, you had disgruntled high-majors. Sometimes they rallied to defend their pride. Sometimes they slumped their shoulders and limped their way back home. On the other, you had plucky underdogs. These guys played their games like any other basketball game. Sometimes the effort looked jarring in context, like when they did it against Arizona in 2012.
This year, we only have the yang. We only have the plucky underdogs. Only four power conference teams accepted The Invitation, and while we will always appreciate and respect SMU, Stanford, Oklahoma State, and Georgia Tech, four is a small number. We’ve got North Alabama in the mix. We’ve got Cal State Northridge. Those teams are fun, but they’re only yang. They lack their yin.
The result is a college basketball lover’s NIT. These are the teams you stay up to watch on winter Thursday nights. San Francisco. Santa Clara. UC Irvine. Samford. They’re deep cuts, but not so deep as to be insignificant. If you love college basketball, you’ve probably thought about something like 28 of these teams at least once this year. Sure, we have Robbie Avila back, now with Saint Louis, and as we get into the later rounds there’s a good chance this starts resembling a normal NIT. But approaching the first round, this is a college basketball lover’s tournament. This is for those with a refined palate.
If you don’t consider your college hoops taste to be exquisite, or if you just don’t know who North Alabama is, don’t fret. This is also an NIT in the pejorative sense, and I don’t mean that the basketball is bad. I’m talking off the court. There is goofiness afoot. The NIT committee had to go so far down its list that someone—UC Riverside, Joe Kelly’s alma mater—had already committed to play in the CBI and had to back out. The NIT didn’t even do a selection show, evidently not knowing with certainty when they’d have the 32 teams locked in. Meanwhile, Fox Sports’s Crown is doing better than expected (we were wrong, but we are also right, and if you read this from last week you’ll get what I mean), but the tournament which pitched itself to power conferences as, paraphrased, ‘college basketball without mid-majors’ has resorted to inviting mid-majors. It can’t fill its spots without them. This is the kind of NIT we’re dealing with. In ten years, we’re going to do a round of, “Remember that time the NIT____?” It will all be things that happened in 2025.
(Selection Show note: You don’t need flash when you’ve got substance. Let the NCAA T*urnament have its Hollywood moment. We’ll be here, with the common man.)
The Crown came up, and so we should talk about it. We were overly optimistic when we dreamt of it crashing and burning. It still might crash and burn, but it didn’t receive as many upturned noses as we’d hoped. We wanted to laugh at it. I don’t think we’re going to get to do that for a minute.
Why do we want the Crown to fail? It’s not that we oppose more postseason college basketball. It’s that the Crown directly attacked the NIT. Even this would be ok—the NIT’s been around a long time; it can handle a little competition—except that the last time a tournament tried to usurp the NIT, World War II started six months later. I’m serious. The last time this happened was 1939, when the NCAA T*urnament was born a bastard child.
I’m never sure if I should be concerned about the Crown. Right now, I think I should be, but not so much because of the NIT. Even if the Crown succeeds at first, it’ll get old fast. And it’s unclear that this year will go down as a success.
Why the concern, then? I’m a little concerned about college sports. Not because of realignment or transfers or NIL, but because of who’s leading the industry as it navigates these waters. The Crown was created by people who think like Brett Yormark. It’s been supported by Yormark, Tony Petitti, and Val Ackerman. Ackerman’s aptitude as Big East Commissioner is debatable, and Yormark’s had his moments running the Big 12, but none of the three are people who “get” college sports. If anyone among them gets even a sport, it’s Ackerman understanding basketball, but at the college level? Sometimes, Big East fans don’t know. Meanwhile, Petitti’s the kind of guy who needs to read off a teleprompter to congratulate Tom Izzo, and Yormark treats every moment like he’s fundraising for a monorail. We’ve got Harold Hill out here running what was recently America’s best basketball conference. He’s fired up about the Crown.
We see three potential reasons there were more Crowners than we expected: The first is that the contractual obligations may be larger than we thought. The second is that confusion may reign to the extent that some schools thought they were contractually obligated to play in the Crown when in reality, they weren’t. (Seriously. We heard of a school who legitimately did not know if they had to play in the Crown or not, and judging by the comments made by various coaches this week, that school was not alone.) The third is that some teams really do want to play in this, possibly because of the “NIL payment” angle?
I put that in scare quotes, but the NIL piece seems to be real. It just isn’t all that big. From what we can gather, Crown semifinalists will get a nice little chunk of NIL cash, with the winning team’s players topping the list at a little over $20,000 apiece (as long as they don’t share with the walk-ons). Not bad, but three-quarters of Crown teams won’t sniff that, and this isn’t Players Era-level money. Plus, even the Players Era Festival didn’t make a spectacular debut.
It’s worth keeping an eye out for real information, but if the Crown does become a long-term threat, I will simply travel to Las Vegas, buy a ticket to all sessions, and boo the participants from my seat in an otherwise empty arena at 10 AM Pacific Time on a Monday.
The thing that’s more worrisome is the opt-outs who aren’t going to the Crown.
As recently as 2022, Xavier won an NIT with an interim coach. Before 2023, the NIT had gone decades without a non-Covid opt-out. Then, last year, the transfer portal opened the day after Selection Sunday, and the dam broke. Coaches wanted new players. Players wanted new coaches. There was no contractual obligation to play, so players and teams didn’t play. College basketball teams stopped playing college basketball. Feel how you will about the NIT, but the NIT is part of this sport. Not to bring up World War II again, but the NIT predates the NCAA T*urnament.
I’d feel better if it were only teams like UNC (who tragically missed the NIT field this season, failing to capitalize on a chance at redemption). But when Wake Forest opts out? That’s a concern. Largely for Wake Forest. Wake Forest has no reason to believe it’ll ever be a consistent NCAA T*urnament program again. In ten years, Wake’s as likely to be in the A-10 as they are to be called a power-conference team. And they declined the NIT? Why have a basketball program if you’re only going to play the regular season?
Making matters worse, some of these teams are opting out because their players don’t want to keep playing. What does it say about a team if its players don’t want to finish their season together?
I don’t know the full story on Wake, and it’s not just Wake. But these smaller high-majors—Rutgers, Northwestern, Pitt, etc.—should play in the NIT. I know guys are hurt, but we talk about Johnny Trueblood so much for a reason. Teams are able to play. They have enough bodies. If they don’t…what in the world are they doing? (Trueblood explanation: In 2019, Tim Miles and the Nebraska Cornhuskers played basketball in the NIT despite not having enough scholarship players to comfortably play basketball in the NIT. Trueblood, a walk-on, became an NIT cult hero, which basically means that I remember him with admiration.)
The NIT will be ok. This year’s is going to be a lot of fun. But is college basketball going to be ok? When the regular season doesn’t draw a crowd and dozens of teams kick themselves out of the postseason? That’s what’s worrisome. It’s a malaise. We need to stop it before it hurts this sport too badly.
In the name of making sure the NIT is ok, though: We do ask that you enter our NIT Bracket Challenge. We got one thousand brackets last year, and we’d love to keep it growing. Also, the more people who join, the likelier it is that The Barking Crow becomes so big that we can simply buy Fox Sports and cancel the Crown. So please tell your friends to join as well. Step by step, friends.
We’ll have plenty more NIT content for you throughout these coming 19 days, from an NIT preview to our own NIT brackets to One Shining MomeNIT at the end of it all. We can’t wait to share in this tournament together. Thank you for being here, we don’t respect the Crown, and bona NIT. That means good NIT in some language that isn’t English.
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As a MAC alum and fan I always love seeing a team or two from my conference in the NIT. While my alma has the role NCAA tournament rep for the conference this year I have to admit I am extremely puzzled by the NIT selection committee inviting Kent State and not the Miami RedHawks.
Miami finished second in the MAC regular season (three full games ahead of third place Kent State) and lost in the last few seconds in the MAC championship game. Kent State lost in the MAC semifinals TO MIAMI.. In fact Kent State lost to Miami all three times they played this year. Miami has stated that they put in a bid to participate and even host to the NIT yet they were snubbed for a team that was three full games in their rear view mirror.
Any idea what happened here?
Great question. We’ve heard a few people asking about Miami.
From what we can tell, the NIT committee’s selections strongly correlate with the seven ratings on the NCAA team sheets: NET, KPI, SOR, WAB, BPI, Torvik, and kenpom. Kent State led Miami in four of the seven and had the better average rating. Definitely debatable, but at least they’re pretty consistent with how they approach it these days.