News has slowly been filtering out about this, but Fran Fraschilla’s tweet last night gave us something in writing. “This is,” as Fraschilla put it, “the final year Garden will host,” or as someone not dealing with a 280-character limit would say, this is the final year Madison Square Garden will host the NIT Final Four, at least in the foreseeable future.
John Templon, the OG NIT bracketologist (and very nice guy who puts up with a lot of our nonsense) has been doing legitimate research on this, so credit to him for the facts herein. What we’ve learned is this:
- Bidding has happened for the 2023 and 2024 NIT Final Fours, to be held at the same site.
- That site has not been announced yet.
- Fraschilla is saying Madison Square Garden is not going to be that site.
My impression, from all of this (not speaking for John, only speaking for myself; not reporting, just offering my own speculation), is that Madison Square Garden does not want to host the NIT Final Four anymore.
This is probably fair, and it makes sense. The NIT Final Four does not draw a great crowd. Nights at MSG are valuable. The NIT probably does not make MSG a lot of money. This is the NCAA’s fault, of course, first for risking ruining college basketball by creating the NCA* *********t in the first place, but then later for failing to market the NIT once they acquired it as part of an antitrust legal settlement. It’s an uphill battle, I get it, I’m trying to make a living blogging about this tournament, I understand the inherent difficulties affecting NIT market, but this seems to be what’s happened: The NCAA didn’t market the NIT very well, Madison Square Garden now wants out.
In the immediate sense, this probably hurts. There’s the risk, as we saw last year, of bigger programs being less keen on playing in a tournament that doesn’t have the MSG carrot at the end (though the potential of home game revenue does speak loudly in the decision room). There’s also the risk, as we saw last year, of lowered NIT interest across the board if ESPN commentators can’t drop references to “The Mecca” as they go into every TV timeout. But at the same time, the short term doesn’t have to be all bad. If a local market gets into hosting the NIT, we could have some fun with them, and we could broaden the NIT’s reach a little bit, even if it’s a more of a mid and low-major-centric operation. Also, the NIT Road Show or The NIT in Exile isn’t the worst storyline. The short term might not be great for the NIT, but new is not always bad. There was something sad about the emptiness of MSG. Playing in a smaller venue in St. Louis or Frisco or Reno (Reno would be the best, if we’re being real here) could lead to fuller seats, especially if a local team with a good following (SLU, UNT, Nevada in these examples) made a run.
It’s the long term we’re worried about. But the long term’s also where the opportunity lies.
There are four core possibilities, as I see it. Obviously, there are more than four possibilities in total, but they’re mainly variations of one of these four angles:
First, there’s the chance the NIT withers and dies. This would unequivocally suck, but we have to acknowledge the potential. This move scares us as much as it does because the NIT has always had MSG, and without MSG, there’s a real risk the NIT will fade to nothing, or to CBI-adjacency (nothing against the CBI, but the NIT and the CBI serve different purposes and are better separate than together). It could happen. It could definitely happen.
Second, there’s the chance the status quo is more or less maintained. The NIT Final Four goes somewhere else for a couple years, maybe connects there, maybe doesn’t, maybe returns to MSG in 2025, maybe doesn’t, maybe returns to New York but not MSG, etc., but nothing too dramatic happens and we all more or less carry on as we’ve been carrying on.
Third, and this is the weirdest one (and the next one’s going to be weird), the NCAA falls apart and/or we have a massive transformation of postseason men’s college basketball. This gets rumbled about here and there, mostly around conference media days when coaches are asked to speculate on things with little of immediately pertinent substance to discuss (this isn’t a knock on media days—we get really valuable insight into coaches’ wacky heads with this line of questioning), and it’s unclear whether or not it could or will happen, but it is very much on the table. There’s dissatisfaction hitting the NCAA on multiple flanks, there’s little natural order supporting the NCAA’s existence, things change rapidly and things we think are unthinkable happen. We could definitely lose the NCA* *********t, or see it transformed into a warped version of itself, or see a new postseason basketball tournament created or a split within Division I or any other number of things. I could speculate for hours on how the NIT would and could fit into any number of futures in this category, but basically, if this happens the NIT’s going to have bigger changes on its hands than moving from New York to Daytona.
Fourth, we’ll have to save the NIT. This is something I said last night on Twitter, in slightly different words, but I was serious when I wrote it. A goal of The Barking Crow is to become a large digital media brand with large financial resources. The NIT was where we started, and it’s been our primary avenue for growth so far, but there is more to this website than the NIT, and if our growth rates continue, by the end of the decade we will be in a position to do things that currently sound like jokes. Such as, buying the NIT. How would this work? Obviously, I don’t know, but the general idea is that we’d go to the NCAA, offer them money in exchange for the NIT (more than it’s worth), and legally agree to not call them on the antitrust stuff. From there, we’d own the NIT like the best professional sports owners own their franchises—we’d run it not necessarily to turn the biggest profit, but to make it the best it could be. We’d work with Madison Square Garden and other venues in New York. We’d work with venues excited about the NIT elsewhere in the country. We’d look with intent at the best format for the postseason NIT and the preseason NIT and any other potential NIT that would help the NIT’s brand. We would be the stewards of the NIT until such a time is reached at which point the NIT does not need our stewardship, and then we’d figure out the next steps from there. This sounds silly, and it is silly—this is a silly blog, and a lot about the NIT is silly. But we do mean it. We want to buy the NIT. And in seven years, we might do just that.
So, that’s where we’re at, that’s where the NIT’s at, that’s what all we know right now. We’ll be excited to hear where the NIT Final Four lands these next two years, and we’ll welcome that city to our NIT family with excitement. After all, they’ll have wanted us. But we also won’t stop working on the NIT’s behalf. Until the proper order of postseason tournaments is restored. We mean it when we say, 32 > 68. We mean it when we say, #Bark. Long live the NIT.
