Before we get into the guts of this (yes, every edition of our daily NIT notes has guts, and no, they actually smell worse than you think, because somebody lit a candle in here and it smells like cinnamon and someone else let their pears ferment so we’ve got a pear-flavored Fireball aroma on top of the rotting), let me disclose that I’m writing this from a Chick-Fil-A parking lot, my esophagus lightly gurgling, on my way to six hours of Stuber Eatsing and two hours of tutoring after spending the morning at the car dealership getting my oil changed and that weird sound coming from the back right wheel silenced (car sounds five years younger all of a sudden—amazing what four hundred big ones can do).
So yes. NIT blogging is just as glamorous as you’d hoped, and I’d encourage everyone to enter the industry. (But I’m still your king—you got that, you little shits?)
Anyhoo. The notes:
- Xavier might be playing a little too well. That, or Oklahoma really executed the dip, dive, and (in the NIT sense) survive last night.
- Cincinnati and Furman waltzed the waltz. Cincinnati waltzed it a little better. But we’re not here to judge. Well done by them both.
- Providence and TCU played that game that felt like déjà vu, which means we’ve all evidently been regularly dreaming about Providence and TCU playing, because I looked it up and I don’t think they’d played since the 90’s. Providence won.
- Josh Pastner smashed a coronavirus piñata in the locker room after Georgia Tech’s win at Nebraska.
- Richmond held off a feisty Northern Iowa. Richmond could also be called feisty. Any good mid-major can be called feisty. It’s one of the great trade secrets of our time.
- Ok, we can go back to that Josh Pastner thing. Here’s the video:
- Our guy.
- Pitt beat Northwestern, which should push the Wildcats back out of our projected NIT field. There are rules here. But I don’t know them all.
- Boise State beat BYU and someone probably’s all wiggly because of it. Maybe a few people. I don’t know, guys. I’ve never been to Boise. It’s one of the two cities on my list right now. My buddy’s moving there from Albuquerque. I swear he’s real. Buddy lived in Albuquerque for four and a half years and I was the only friend to ever visit him there. Messed up. Maybe he isn’t real? I should document the Boise visit, to be safe. Still mad about the Taco Bell Arena getting renamed. Document that first.
- Pepperdine executed the beat-Cal strategy, beating Cal.
- Missouri beat Liberty in a, well, it was a basketball game, then looked around the room while we all solemnly made eye contact and nodded our approval.
- Not a whole lot going on tonight, but the San Diego State/Arizona State game could look bigger in hindsight, the San Francisco’s host Long Beach State in a tuneup they might lose, and there’s a big nonconference-even-though-half-the-Summit-League’s-in-it event happening the next few nights in Sioux Falls—the four Dakota schools going at each other like they’re Cain and Abel and then another Cain and then another ’nother Cain because there’s only one Abel in the Dakotas and I think it might be South Dakota. Again, not fully NIT-relevant, but who are we to hate on fun.
