Well, it’s happening. The long-anticipated, already much-maligned, quite possibly doomed NIT competitor is coming into existence. Fox Sports needed a little more college basketball TV inventory. They’ll evidently get it, at least for a year.
Some backstory: On September 11th, Seth Davis reported on plans for a Fox Sports-built competitor to the NIT. A 16-team event featuring teams from the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten, chosen by NET. This was the threat many believe led the NCAA to change the format of the NIT, eliminating the 2006–2023 automatic bid system and adding new automatic bids for power conferences. Was the Fox Sports Tournament real? We didn’t know. We were hoping the NIT had staved it off. Alas.
Today, Fox Sports announced that the Fox Sports tournament is coming. The details:
- It will be called the College Basketball Crown.
- It will be held in Las Vegas.
- It will be played from Monday, March 31st of next year through Sunday, April 6th. (The NCAA Tournament’s Final Four and Championship will be played on Saturday, April 5th and Monday, April 7th next year in San Antonio. The expectation is that the NIT Final Four and Championship will be played on Tuesday, April 1st and Thursday, April 3rd.
- It will be a 16-team event, with a total of six automatic bids awarded across the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten. At-larges will be an option. “Teams that did not qualify for the NCAA tournament will be eligible for the College Basketball Crown, with two automatic qualifiers coming from each participating conference and additional teams chosen by a committee.”
Thoughts:
Why Fox Sports Wants This
For Fox Sports, the draw here is presumably the TV inventory. More college basketball at an emptier time in the buildup to the men’s and women’s Final Fours. A little more than a million people watched each of this year’s Tuesday night NIT quarterfinals. That’s not nothing. Fox Sports, who doesn’t have the men’s NCAA Tournament or the women’s NCAA Tournament, wants in on postseason college basketball.
Why does Fox Sports not simply buy some NIT games? It’s not as simple as that. The NCAA packages the NIT together with all its championship broadcast rights. FCS football. Women’s basketball. Baseball. Softball. The NIT. All the championships the NCAA runs besides men’s basketball are bundled together into one big package. ESPN buys that package. My impression is that ESPN likes the bundle because it gives them exclusivity and saves them time. My guess is that the NCAA also likes this time-saving aspect, and that the NCAA probably believes ESPN is paying a premium because of the exclusivity piece. There’s nothing wrong with the approach. We’re not criticizing the NCAA here. They know their market better than we do. But that’s why Fox Sports can’t just buy a few NIT games. (Although, I do wonder what would happen if Fox Sports offered to buy a few NIT games from ESPN—ones that would otherwise be streamed on ESPN+ as opposed to broadcast on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, or ACC or SEC Network. Maybe it wouldn’t work. I’m just curious.)
Will This Work?
As someone who follows the NIT in excruciating detail: I really doubt that this is going to be a successful enterprise.
First, there’s the question of whether teams would rather play in this than the NIT. The quality of this tournament would be questionable—great at the top but thin at the bottom. The travel would be a lot to ask. There’s also the question of preference. People like the NIT. Would Iowa rather play Kansas State in Las Vegas in a tournament whose name its fans don’t recognize, two weeks after its season ends? Or would it prefer to play K-State at Carver–Hawkeye Arena right after the Big Ten Tournament, in front of its home fans?
Second, there’s the opt-out issue. The NIT just suffered a historic number of opt-outs. A number of programs are in more of a championship-or-bust headspace than they’ve ever been, whether the championship they seek is in any way realistic or not. How will Fox Sports convince their partner teams to actually play? They can offer some money, but that will cut into their eventual profit, and I don’t get the impression that even the NIT, our beloved NIT, is rolling in dough over here.
The transfer portal’s opening will likely shift backwards, but that wasn’t the only reason for the opt-outs. There are players and coaches who do not want to play and coach in anything other than the NCAA Tournament. That’s going to be an even bigger problem for this Fox Sports tournament, which lacks the history of the NIT and the noble “accept the tournament you earned” angle, two things a lot of coaches respect.
Even if the transfer portal window does shift backwards, it would have to shift by three full weeks to accommodate Fox Sports here. The dates are a very strange choice. The NIT has an advantage on timing.
This problem only grows for Fox Sports if NCAA Tournament expansion happens. It grows for the NIT too, of course, but NCAA Tournament expansion would be bad for this event.
Third, there’s the fan interest piece. Will fans tune in to watch Butler play Minnesota? Yes, probably, but not to as great an extent as they did when that game happened in the NIT. The NIT is a known entity. Casual sports fans know what the NIT is. More know the NIT than know the CBI. More know the CBI than know the CIT or the Vegas Sixteen. This is part of the issue the NCAA has run into with branding its new WBIT, the women’s NIT equivalent. Fans expect the WNIT to be in that role. There’s a history to the NIT that affects even people who don’t care about history.
Fourth…Las Vegas? The NIT tried putting its Final Four in Las Vegas last year. I believe that fewer than three thousand people attended the semifinals, and the plurality of those were Wisconsin fans who left after their team was eliminated. People like going to Las Vegas for college basketball, but outside of the WCC and Mountain West Tournaments, they aren’t going for in-person college basketball. They’re going to watch NCAA Tournament games on sportsbook TV’s. I don’t believe the other conference tournaments held there thrive in terms of attendance. Will fans come to Vegas for what might be just one game, played by a scaled-back roster after two weeks idle? This thing is mostly happening on weekdays. It’s happening a long ways away from almost every power conference school.
Maybe this will work. Maybe Fox Sports has something unanticipated up its sleeve. But in the private sector, things eventually have to make money. It’s hard to see how there’s enough interest from fans to sustain this, unless the NIT and CBI are doing a lot better than I realize. If that’s the case, then hey—maybe there’s enough interest to go around. (Again, I really don’t think that’s the case.)
What This Means for the NIT
Honestly, this isn’t as bad as I was expecting. This feels pretty good for the NIT relative to what we feared. Fox Sports had a whole year, and this was the best they could come up with? It’s almost as bad as the original idea. It might be even worse, depending on the commitment Fox Sports has from its partner conferences. I was worried the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten were entirely separating themselves from the NIT. It’s still possible that will happen, but this announcement is soft on that front.
That said, there’s a lot we still don’t know here. The two biggest questions are:
- Will teams who receive an “automatic bid” to this Fox Sports event be contractually required to accept, through their media grant of rights with Fox Sports?
- Will Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten teams who don’t receive an automatic bid be required to prioritize this tournament over the NIT?
Let’s look at a scenario that splits the difference on those.
Here’s a rough guess at how the NIT would have changed this year if you took away the two highest-seeded teams from each of the Big Ten, Big East, and Big 12 (we’re counting Utah as a Big 12 team because they will be next year):
| OUT | IN |
| Seton Hall | UMass |
| Villanova | George Mason |
| Utah | Santa Clara |
| Cincinnati | Louisiana Tech |
| Ohio State | Northern Iowa |
| Iowa | Charlotte |
The column on the right is great. The column on the right isn’t our problem. There are a lot of North Texas/UAB/Utah Valley/Indiana State-adjacent programs in the right-hand column. The left-hand column is tougher. Thankfully, it’s not huge, but this gets at what we don’t know: What will happen with the other ten spots?
Even in the worst case, one in which the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten shun the NIT entirely and fewer ACC and SEC teams play, the NIT could be ok in the long term. This Fox Sports thing doesn’t seem likely to thrive. If it fails, the NIT could return to its current state. It might have its scars from the ordeal, though. And that’s if the NCAA keeps running it. In November, Dan Gavitt—the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball—said, “The very viability of the (NIT) could be in jeopardy,” in reference to this event. That’s not great.
There are always reimagined ideas for the NIT format. Generally, the NIT hasn’t needed them. The NIT has been just fine as it is. The NCAA does have advantages in that they run the NCAA Tournament. The NCAA could theoretically invite early NCAA Tournament losers to enter the NIT in the second round or the quarterfinals. The NCAA could put a carrot at the end of the NIT—maybe even the guarantee of an NCAA Tournament bid for the next year (we NIT diehards would scoff at that as a carrot, but we’re trying to stay on topic here). The NCAA could try the stick again—taking away NCAA Tournament access from programs who shun an NCAA-run tournament—but the last time they did that, it eventually resulted in an antitrust lawsuit they settled out of court. (This is why the NCAA now owns the NIT.) The NCAA has a lot of power in college basketball. Much more than it does in college football.
Is the NCAA contractually obligated to continue running the NIT? I’m not sure. ESPN put 31 games on its networks and streaming platform this year. I believe 18 of those were on ESPN or ESPN2, while five were on ESPNU and SEC Network. The WBIT put some games on ESPNU and ESPN2 as well, if not on more channels. This could be relevant in two ways: First, contractual obligations are a persuasive thing. Second, ESPN might be looking for 23 games worth of inventory. Not the full 31.
We do have a doomsday plan here at The Barking Crow, a list of whom we’d call if there was ever a credible threat that the NIT would be shut down. We won’t get into that plan in too much detail, because we don’t know all of what we don’t know, but we’d be in contact with the NCAA, ESPN, Coaches vs. Cancer, and a few specific coaches, to give you a general idea of what direction we’d head. We don’t have any formal affiliation with the NIT. We just love it. If there is ever a possibility of the NIT going away, we will do everything in our power to stop that from happening. If we fail in that endeavor, we will then shift our efforts to resurrecting the NIT. The NIT has dealt with imitations for 85 years. We don’t intend to let these Fox Sports doofuses be the ones who finally do it in.
Long live the NIT.
32 > Fox Sports.
Bark.
