NCAA T*urnament expansion may or may not be imminent. Lately, it’s sounding more like it is. Ross Dellenger reported pretty confidently on Friday that next year, there’ll be 76 teams in the field, leaving eight fewer for the NIT, CBI, etc.
Does it matter for the NIT?
No.
Six years ago, the NCAA Tournament taking eight teams from the NIT would have meant a clean decapitation. All four 1-seeds, gone. All four 2-seeds, gone. Today is different. Opt-outs are common. Our best estimate is that this year, 16 teams didn’t play in the NIT who would have accepted bids in 2020. Expand the NCAA Tournament by eight teams, and the total number lost becomes…18? 19? The NIT has changed, and it is changing. But NCAA Tournament expansion is a drop in that bucket.
Even if NCAA Tournament expansion does happen, any negative effects on the NIT might be undone by the cessation of the College Basketball Crown. Was this the last Crown? We don’t know, but the Crown is more vulnerable to NCAAT expansion than the NIT is. Expand the NCAA Tournament by eight teams, and the NIT loses less than ten percent of its field. Expand the NCAA Tournament by eight teams, and the Crown loses half its teams with winning records. Despite shrinking its size from sixteen to eight, the Crown still had to settle for three sub-.500 programs this year, including Rutgers who finished the season with 14 wins, 20 losses, and a 125th-place ranking in kenpom. Take away Oklahoma and other bubblers, and teams like Rutgers might be the only Crown candidates left.
Even if the Crown does survive the first year or two of NCAA Tournament expansion, inertia isn’t on its side. The NIT’s the oldest thing college basketball has. The Crown is not. It would take effort to kill the NIT. It takes effort to keep the Crown alive. Whether there’s a 2027 College Basketball Crown or not, any NIT losses to NCAA Tournament expansion should be outweighed by the Crown’s eventual closure. If it takes out the Crown, NCAA Tournament expansion could eventually actually help the NIT, and not only if we got our play-in/play-out pipe dream we discussed a few weeks ago.
Speculate all you want about the NIT’s future. There’s plenty of fodder there. But while NCAA Tournament expansion seems imminent, the NIT appears safe. And whether the NIT’s safe or not, its future isn’t particularly linked to a switch from 68 to 76.
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I did ask around this past weekend about next year’s NIT. Specifically, I asked whether the NIT Final Four would be back in Indianapolis on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule or integrated with the NCAAT Final Four again, played on Thursday and Sunday in next year’s Final Four city, Detroit. I didn’t get any clear answers, but my impression is that 1) the NCAA hasn’t made that decision and that 2) the NCAA felt this year’s changes were successful in drawing more enthusiasm towards the NIT. For what it’s worth, I’d vote to try it out in Detroit. It wouldn’t be the exact same—Hinkle Fieldhouse is an amazing place, and it’s easiest for the NCAA to run events in Indianapolis where NCAA headquarters and therefore employees live—but the experiment was a net positive for attention, and attention is the lifeblood of what’s technically an entertainment product. Try to get Little Caesars Arena, NCAA. Preferably before the NHL and NBA schedules come out. (The NHL released its schedule in July last year.)
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I can never decide whether I like Dan Hurley. He’s an asshole. He’s hilarious, sometimes on purpose. (“I’ve had a negative influence on Geno” made me laugh out loud.) Every now and then, he’s reflective in a way that makes clear he cares. The detestable things about him are the whining, the melodramatic whining, and the whiny attempts to be cool through being self-aware. Ultimately, I probably wish he was more of a bit character than a main character. He’s too successful. He’d be more sympathetic in smaller doses.
Luke Murray got a ton of credit for this UConn performance these last four years. In 2023 and 2024 specifically, UConn dominated the X’s and O’s. That was their biggest advantage, which is a big claim considering they beat Matt Painter in 2024. I don’t know if Murray’s going to succeed at Boston College—X’s and O’s geniuses sometimes do and sometimes don’t work out in head coaching roles—but more importantly, I don’t know how Hurley’s going to do post-Murray. His floor should still be high, but where’s the ceiling now? It’s easy to see UConn receding into a second weekend program, especially in a sport that iterates so quickly. Maybe it works out even if the team isn’t that good—one convenient set of matchups can turn a fringe top-25 team into a Final Four team—but there’s a possibility that we’ve seen the last of UConn. Every great college basketball coach has a specific area or two where they excel. Hurley’s areas have been a confident culture and the X’s and O’s dominance that may or may not belong to Murray.
Once upon a time, there was a football program that similarly outperformed its baseline. That team had a character at head coach, one of the best assistants in the sport, a confident culture, and some other secret sauces. (For a high percentage of players tested, those sauces were performance enhancing drugs.) Then, the great assistant left, the sauces got caught, and the culture turned out to be hard to recapture.
Was Luke Murray the basketball equivalent of Brent Venables?
Is Dan Hurley about to be basketball’s Dabo Swinney?
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The transfer portal’s open, and that means the transfer portal’s overflowing, and that means people are freaking out about the transfer portal, especially after Michigan won that tournament with a starting five made entirely of transfers. I get it. On the biggest point, I agree. So many players changing teams every year is bad. But too much attention’s being paid to fears of the transfer portal superteam.
Transfer portal superteams aren’t happening.
For one thing, we’re in an era with a lot of one-and-done. The best NBA prospects last year were freshmen. The best NBA prospects this year were freshmen. Best prospects aren’t all the best college players (Yaxel Lendeborg’s a better player than prospect because he’s already 23), but a lot of them are. Superteams might happen, but they were happening before free transfers. Duke might get another 2018–19 roster in a few years. That doesn’t have anything to do with the portal.
For another, the best players aren’t transferring. Maybe this changes as guys get their draft feedback, but I think Flory Bidunga is the only player from EvanMiya’s top 50 currently in the transfer portal. Maybe I’m missing one, maybe others hop in. A lot of those top-50 guys are going to the draft, and a lot were seniors. But the point is, if you want to build a superteam out of this year’s portal, it isn’t obvious who you’d take.
The third thing is the most important: The two most impactful players for Michigan this weekend were Aday Mara and Elliot Cadeau. Both were highly regarded transfers, but neither was a five-star last offseason on 247. Mara was ranked behind Moustapha Thiam and Owen Freeman. Cadeau was ranked behind Pop Isaacs and Naithan George. Dusty May didn’t buy a transfer portal superteam. He built a historically good team using players from the transfer portal. Sure, Lendeborg cost a lot of money, and it’s not like Mara and Cadeau played for free. But Michigan doesn’t beat Arizona and UConn without Mara and Cadeau. Mara and Cadeau were ranked behind Thiam and Isaacs for fair reason. That’s talent identification and talent development, not talent purchase. Transfers weren’t the superteam. Dusty May was the superteam.
God willing, May will go to the NBA and spare us from more years of Michigan success. One potential issue with that, though: Imagine trying to convince an NBA player to miss twelve shots in the first half as secret post feeds off the backboard, like May had Cadeau do on Saturday to neutralize Arizona’s bigs. Try that with LeBron James and he’d be at the scorer’s table at the first timeout demanding his misses be changed to assists.
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Michael Malone isn’t a bad hire for UNC, but any hire at UNC right now is a marketing play towards boosters. UNC wasn’t hiring anybody who’d thrill their donor base. Billy Donovan was going to make them wait, and he wasn’t a sure bet to say yes. By Monday, the best sitting head coach who was potentially attainable was Ben McCollum, and even he might not have left Iowa City, where he gets to be king and doesn’t have to deal with critical idiots who hired Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson.
UNC definitely does believe in using the front office model for college sports, by which I mean they seem to like the idea of having dedicated roster assemblers who are separate from the head coach. That’s a big part of their setup for football. That was their last attempted fix with Hubert Davis. Hiring an NBA guy, then, is more in character for them than it would be for Kentucky. It’s easy to trace how they got here, and given the choice between Michael Malone’s upside and someone like Bill Armstrong’s (the coach at McNeese, to pick a random successful low-major coach), I’d probably also take Malone. The trend right now is not for sitting head coaches to leave power conference jobs. There’s a premium on security, familiarity, and comfort, none of which are part of the deal in Chapel Hill.
The most interesting development in the search came at the last minute, when Pete Thamel dropped Scott Drew’s name into the mix. Was Drew looking for leverage for more resources from his new AD at Baylor? Or did he actually want to leave? That’s a thing to watch.
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There’s an NIT alum in the Masters. His name is Brandon Holtz. He played basketball for Illinois State from the fall of 2005 through the spring of 2009. He didn’t see the court during the Redbirds’ 2008 NIT run, but he did get in for a minute in an overtime loss to Kansas State in 2009.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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Notre Dame hoops are on the mind, and unfortunately not only as a memory. Technically, the program still exists, despite the best efforts of seemingly everyone tasked with stewarding it over these last ten years.
There’s a fight going on in the Notre Dame world over whether Micah Shrewsberry deserves the blame for the current state of the program or whether this is all about Notre Dame boosters not putting in resources. The answer, of course, is both. They’re both very bad. Notre Dame’s put resources into men’s basketball only once since NIL was legalized. That one time went pretty well. Shrewsberry got a top-15 high school recruiting class headlined by Jalen Haralson, who might be starting for Kentucky next year. The team stunk, though, and now it appears the resource faucet’s turned back off.
It’s hard to succeed in today’s college basketball without some sort of NIL and revenue sharing. But Notre Dame’s struggles have gone beyond talent. They had six horrific collapses last year in conference play alone. This year, they left the game in Berkeley up to the refs, lost it, then self-destructed for the rest of a season lowlighted by a technical foul against Louisville because of a scorebook issue. Meanwhile, only Markus Burton (2023–24) and Tae Davis (2024–25) have topped Braeden Shrewsberry in minutes in a season the last three years, despite Braeden Shrewsberry grading out on EvanMiya as the seventh man his freshman year and the fifth man as a sophomore. What booster would start donating to the program right now?
It’s a bad job these days, but Micah Shrewsberry’s done a bad job at it. In some ways, it’s unfair to him, because he certainly could do more with more. But it’s hard to blame boosters when they were (seemingly) walled off from boosting while Jack Swarbrick was AD and have now seen two straight seasons of embarrassing, inexcusable mistakes.
The worst part is that nothing’s going to change next year. The roster will be even worse. Braeden Shrewsberry will be even more central to the gameplan, by this point understandably. That means Micah Shrewsberry’s probably playing out the string until Notre Dame finally cuts bait. It’s a sunk cost, and even though he might succeed somewhere else, he’s not going to succeed at Notre Dame.
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One last thing that was glossed over three weeks ago:
The NCAA T*urnament selection committee did a great job this year. Not only were they the most predictable they’ve ever been (as scored by Bracket Matrix), a sign that they’re operating in line with objective criteria, but the way in which they surprised was a welcome change: Sunday’s results actually mattered. This almost never happens.
So, shoutout to Keith Gill, Sun Belt commissioner and NCAAT selection committee chair. It’s an unholy tournament you’re selecting, but at least you’re doing good work within those bounds.
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