Steve Helwick messaged me last night with a question. He said it came up in a group chat.
“Is Seton Hall having the worst season a defending NIT champion has ever had?”
The answer is not quite yes.
In 1950, the City College of New York Beavers won the national championship, downing Squeaky Melchiorre and top-ranked Bradley in the NIT Championship at Madison Square Garden. CCNY was unranked entering the NIT, but the NCAA T*urnament—ever the copycat—saw the Beavers’ success and invited them to their own tournament, which took place after the NIT. Against lesser competition, CCNY won that too. It’s a storied accomplishment, one made all the more remarkable because CCNY was a pretty big underdog entering postseason play.
CCNY hadn’t put together a great regular season, but they dominated in March. Why weren’t they better in the season’s winter months? It turned out, they might have been fixing games.
America didn’t know that when the 1950–51 season began. CCNY opened the year atop the Coaches Poll, then won their regular season opener against St. Francis. Their next eight games, however, went poorly. They only barely beat BYU at Madison Square Garden on December 5th. They lost to Missouri by 17, again at MSG, on December 9th. On December 28th, they hit a nadir, losing to visiting Arizona by a bizarre 41–38 final, one which reportedly left spectators feeling something was amiss. That game was also at MSG, and in the second leg of the evening’s doubleheader, Long Island let Western Kentucky score 13 points in the final two minutes.
In mid-February, undercover detectives from the Manhattan DA’s office arrested three CCNY players on their way home from a win at Temple. In custody, the players confessed to shaving points, with Time reporting shortly thereafter that the Arizona and Missouri games had been among those in which points were shaved.
The scandal was massive, and while MSG was its epicenter, CCNY was far from the only program involved. Players from Manhattan, NYU, LIU, Toledo, Bradley (yes, Squeaky Melchiorre was involved), Kentucky, and Columbia were all eventually sentenced for roles in various match-fixing and point-shaving schemes. Based on the number of accusations thrown around by those charged, it’s likely more schools were touched by gamblers. Gambling was a dirtier business then than it even is now. The same was true of college sports. Pay-for-play was rampant. Part of the fallout from the CCNY scandal was an effective one-year suspension of Kentucky’s basketball program. The suspension didn’t even have to do with gambling. The point-shaving happened, the NCAA started poking around, and Kentucky’s under-the-table payments and lax eligibility standards earned the Cats a hard slap on the wrist. That, at least, is my impression of how it all went down.
Plenty of college basketball teams were involved in gambling in 1950 and ‘51. Plenty stayed involved after the CCNY scandal. In 1961, a new gambling scandal (with at least one overlapping figure—Jack Molinas, the Columbia player from the CCNY scandal) touched 22 different teams. But while gambling problems were widespread, CCNY was the one whose name got attached to 1951’s arrests. CCNY was the one whose basketball program fell apart. CCNY was the one who eventually demoted itself to Division III, pushing what had effectively been New York City’s state school to the college sports sideline. CCNY was the face of the scandal, and the scandal blew up the year after they won the NIT, and for that reason, I would say their championship hangover season was worse than what Seton Hall’s currently experiencing.
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Still, the 1950–51 CCNY Beavers were not as bad as the 2024–25 Seton Hall Pirates, relative to their competition. The Beavers went 12–7. So, while Seton Hall is not having the worst season a defending champion has ever had, they might have the worst team. There’s only one real challenger.
A decent number of NIT champions have gone on to post a losing record the next time around. Only one, though, won single-digit games in its post-championship season. Again, scandal had something to do with it.
On April 3rd, 2003, St. John’s won its record sixth NIT championship. Senior guard Marcus Hatten was named tournament MVP. On November 25th, 2003, Hatten was arrested and charged with fifth-degree possession of marijuana, as was Willie Shaw. Hatten had graduated. Shaw was still on the team. In December, St. John’s fired head coach Mike Jarvis, partly because the team sucked, partly because of the arrest, and partly because he’d brought in and retained a player who physically assaulted a woman on the St. John’s swim team in their dormitory hallway. Grady Reynolds, the player in question, was never suspended by St. John’s for the assault.
In February, 5–14 overall and fresh off a 20-point loss to Pitt, six players brought a stripper back to their hotel from a Pittsburgh strip club, allegedly promising to pay her one thousand dollars to have sex with them. Five of the six had sex with her, but the group refused to pay, leading the stripper to accuse them of rape. The players were exonerated when it turned out one of them had videotaped the whole thing.
Reynolds was expelled, Elijah Ingram dropped out, and four other players were suspended. One of those—Abe Keita—hired lawyers over the suspension, and amidst other legal posturing accused St. John’s of paying him. This eventually led to St. John’s vacating the 2003 NIT title.
Again, all of that constitutes a worse season than what Seton Hall is currently doing. But for the sake of basketball-to-basketball comparison: St. John’s went 6–21 that season, with a 1–15 record in Big East play. St. John’s finished the year ranked 200th in kenpom. Seton Hall is currently 6–18 overall, 1–12 in the Big East, and 214th in kenpom.
Seton Hall is not having the worst season of any defending NIT champion. But Seton Hall might have the worst team.
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