No collegiate athletic department has won the Division I football national championship and the men’s basketball national championship in the same academic year since 1995-96. No, Florida didn’t do it back in the Tim Tebow/Joakim Noah days. That tournament Noah won was not the NIT.
The last teams to do it were from Nebraska, and their places are deservedly etched in the golden ears of history. We remember them fondly, looking at our tattoos of Tom Osborne jumping into Danny Nee’s arms wistfully every January, every March, and on certain Wednesdays in late summer. We tell our children about Erick Strickland, the kid from Bellevue who defied the odds to become the NIT MVP. We remember.
We’ve wondered, from time to time, whether anyone would do it again. After all, the SEC hasn’t won an NIT since the South Carolina repeat, and a Gamecocks championship on the gridiron isn’t walking through that door. Clemson’s had its chances, only for the pressure to prove too great. Texas’s name gets thrown around, but rarely very seriously anymore.
But last night, when LSU went and let Vanderbilt score 99 points without Aaron Nesmith, hope sprung anew.
Now, it would take a lot for LSU to qualify for this year’s NIT. The Tigers dug themselves quite the hole, beginning SEC play 8-0 and all. But a skid isn’t out of the question. The only games it’d be a big surprise for them to lose are at home against Mizzou, Texas A&M, and Georgia. Lose even one of those and a .500 conference record is on the table. Lose two, and lose all the other games (of course), and you can start scouting Arkansas-Little Rock.
Part of what makes LSU’s NIT potential so attainable is the SEC’s lack of very good teams. They have plenty of good teams, of course—Kentucky, Auburn, Arkansas, LSU…arguably Alabama, Mississippi State, and Florida. But they don’t have any really good teams, and it’s easy to see LSU’s victories beginning to productively wither in stature under the bright lights of March. Basically, as long as nobody in the SEC gets too hot, anybody in the SEC can, for the time being, still make the NIT. Which means that for the time being, it really does just mean more.
