Our NIT Bracketology is live, as is our NCAA Tournament Bracketology. Here’s what to know:
Our Model Isn’t Here Yet
Later in the season, we’ll roll back out our full college basketball model, with tournament probabilities and frequently updated bracketology. It’ll incorporate all the ratings systems on the team sheet, plus those little things that affect Selection Sunday, things like Q1 wins, nonconference strength of schedule, and whether a team’s coach is named Tom Izzo. Why don’t we have that running right now? Because with the baby arriving in the next few weeks and college football ongoing, we were not going to be able to keep the model current over the month of November. Instead, we ran a very basic bracketology this morning, and we’ll launch the model once we’re confident we can run it every day (or something close to every day).
How the Bracketologies Work Instead
Instead of the big, full model, we’re doing this rather simply: We gave KenPom double weight, we gave Pomeroy’s HUMAN poll single weight, and we built our preliminary 1–364 seed list accordingly. We then fine-tuned the list by deducting a little from mid-majors and a lot from low-majors, as the committees tend to do. Then, we lined everyone up, called each conference’s highest-rated team the favorite, and built the brackets. This is very simple stuff, but as a preseason baseline, it gets the job done.
The NIT Bracketology is much more confusing than the NCAA Tournament Bracketology, so here comes our first of what I’m sure will be many attempts to explain it:
Exempt Bids
The ACC and SEC get two exempt bids each. We’ve given those to the highest-rated teams in each conference after NCAA Tournament bids have been determined. All conferences rated among the top twelve by KenPom get one exempt bid each. This gives the ACC and SEC a third bid, and it gives ten other conferences a first exempt bid. For seven of those next ten conferences (MWC, A-10, AAC, WCC, WAC, MVC, and CUSA), this exempt bid goes to the first non-NCAAT team on the list. For three others (Big 12, Big Ten, Big East), it’s more complicated.
For those three Fox Sports conferences, we’re at least momentarily respecting the College Basketball Crown’s legal power. The College Basketball Crown has some sort of contractual tie with those conferences which evidently says it gets two teams from each. We aren’t sure which two teams those will be, but for the time being, we’ve given those six bids (two from each of the three conferences) to the teams who’d otherwise be first in line for the NIT exempt bid, meaning the first two non-NCAAT teams. Once that’s complete, we’ve given the NIT exempt bid to the next team up from each conference in question.
What does this look like in practice? Here is/are the exempt–bid team(s) from each league. For nine of the twelve, this is the first non-NCAAT team(s) available. For the other three, it’s the first non-NCAAT/CBC team.
- ACC: Miami, NC State, Louisville
- SEC: Mississippi, LSU, Missouri
- Atlantic 10: VCU
- Mountain West: Boise State
- Big Ten: Northwestern (USC and Rutgers to CBC)
- Big 12: Arizona State (TCU and UCF to CBC)
- Big East: Seton Hall (Providence and Butler to CBC, though we’re skeptical that Butler would let the Big East make them do this)
- American: UAB
- WCC: San Francisco
- Conference USA: Louisiana Tech
- Missouri Valley: Northern Iowa
- WAC: Seattle
Importantly, these sixteen teams get the first round home games.
Automatic Bids
The NIT will also be awarding automatic bids again this year, if anybody qualifies. To qualify, a team must 1) win their regular season conference championship, 2) lose in their conference tournament, and 3) finish with an average ranking of 125th or better across the seven team sheet rating systems.
Within our top 125, there are nine conference favorites who are not in an exempt conference. Our math indicates that five is the likeliest number of realized automatic bids from this group of teams. Our math indicates that High Point, Ohio, Wofford, College of Charleston, and Appalachian State are likelier to lose in their conference tournaments than Princeton, McNeese, Vermont, and UC Irvine. So, we’ve given those five teams automatic bids in our projection.
The reason we do this is not to say that High Point or App State is definitely making the NIT. For one thing, nobody is definitely making the NIT right now. There’s too much season to be played. More importantly, we include the automatic bids because we want to give an accurate projection of where the cut line will fall. Right now, we have it falling between Nevada (last team in) and Georgia Tech (first team out).
At-Large Bids
With eleven slots remaining, the next thing we do is pluck the top eleven available teams: teams who aren’t in the NCAAT, aren’t set aside for the CBC, and aren’t already in the NIT. Then, we make the bracket according to the bracketing principles as we understand them. We aren’t worrying about opt-outs yet, though we’ll have a provision about those in our model. We aren’t worried about other teams opting for the College Basketball Crown beyond those who might be contractually obligated. We definitely have some pro-NIT bias, but we don’t see why any coach would prefer making his team wait two weeks and then travel to Las Vegas during Final Four week when he could simply play in the NIT instead.
What Comes Next
We’ll try to update the bracketologies after Feast Week, but without knowing when exactly the baby will come and what exactly fatherhood entails (we get the general concept, to be clear), we don’t want to commit to anything. The best we can offer is that come January, we’ll have a plan for regular updates. Thanks, as always, for bearing with us.
