NIT Bracketology: Bid Thief Implications, How to Watch the NIT Selection Show

This is our NIT Bracketology rundown for the morning of Saturday, March 16^th. If you’re looking for the most current rundown, visit our homepage.

Most NIT contenders have finished play. Not all of them, but most. The picture is coming into focus. Four questions remain to be settled over the next 36 hours.

The first question is where the cut lines will fall, based on conference tournament results. Games we believe will affect that:

• Saturday, 11:00 AM EDT – Princeton vs. Brown (Ivy League Semifinal, ESPNU)
• Saturday, 1:00 PM EDT – VCU vs. Saint Joseph’s (Atlantic 10 Tournament Semifinal, CBSSN)
• Saturday, 1:30 PM EDT – Yale vs. Cornell (Ivy League Semifinal, ESPNNews)
• Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT – South Florida vs. UAB (AAC Tournament Semifinal, ESPN2)
• Saturday, 3:30 PM EDT – Duquesne vs. St. Bonaventure (Atlantic 10 Tournament Semifinal, CBSSN)
• Saturday, 5:30 PM EDT – Florida Atlantic vs. Temple (AAC Tournament Semifinal, ESPN2)
• Saturday, 8:30 PM EDT – North Carolina vs. NC State (ACC Tournament Championship, ESPN)
• Saturday, 9:00 PM EDT – Colorado vs. Oregon (Pac-12 Tournament Championship, FOX)
• Saturday, 11:30 PM EDT – Grand Canyon vs. UT Arlington (WAC Tournament Championship, ESPN2)
• Sunday, 12:00 PM EDT – Ivy League Tournament Championship, ESPN2
• Sunday, 3:15 PM EDT – AAC Tournament Championship, ESPN

Twelve games, combining to decide the NIT cut line on the bottom side and whether the last NCAA Tournament at-large selection will go to the 46^th (if FAU, UNC, and Colorado all win their conference tournaments), 45^th (if one of those three goes down), 44^th (if two go down), or 43^rd (all three) team on the seed list. Conference by conference, how the NIT would be affected:

• ACC: If NC State beats UNC, it’s a one in, one out situation. NC State would bump one team into the NIT, but because they’re already in our projected bracket, the NIT’s cut lines would be effectively unaffected.
• Pac-12: If Oregon beats Colorado, it’s again one in, one out. We believe Colorado is safely in the NCAA Tournament, though we wouldn’t bet our lives on it.
• AAC: If South Florida wins the tournament, it’s one in, one out. If UAB or Temple wins it, the team bumped down from the NCAA Tournament will bump out the last NIT at-large. (UAB’s on the NIT bubble, so their semifinal will also affect the picture.)
• Atlantic 10: If Duquesne wins the tournament, it’s one in, one out. Duquesne will swap with VCU. If St. Bonaventure or Saint Joe’s wins, an at-large will be bumped out of the NIT. (St. Bonaventure is on the NIT bubble, so their semifinal will also affect the picture, as might Saint Joe’s.)
• Ivy League: If Yale wins the tournament, it’s one in, one out. Yale will swap with Princeton. If Cornell wins, Cornell will have gone through Yale and will likely just swap with Yale. If Brown wins, the last NIT at-large will be bumped out by Princeton inserting itself into the mix. (Yale and Cornell are both on the NIT bubble, and it’s possible their semifinal will also affect the picture.)
• WAC: If UT Arlington beats Grand Canyon, someone will be bumped out of the NIT as Grand Canyon takes an at-large spot.

The second question is who will be available after NCAA Tournament selection is completed. The NCAA Tournament Selection Show is tomorrow, Sunday, at 6:00 PM EDT on CBS.

The third question is opt-outs. We’ve had three mild ones so far—teams with poor projected seeds or an NIT bubble situation (Memphis, Mississippi, and Indiana). For the sake of our NIT probabilities, we’re currently telling our model to allow its simulated NIT committee to consider those teams in 10% of cases, in case there was a bad report on Indiana or something else dramatically changes (we’re especially watching Mississippi with this one, given Chris Beard’s prominence in coaching rumors).

Will there be more NIT opt-outs? We don’t know. Historically, they’re extraordinarily rare, but there have been instances (Georgia in 2018, Texas Tech last year) in which a team is falling apart with a coaching change and/or the transfer portal and they’ve asked to not be invited. We’ve always seen the NIT committee honor that request. UNC was unique as a true declined bid.

There were a lot of opt-outs in 2021, the Covid season, and some of those went under the radar. We don’t know if every opt-out will be reported. We might never really know who opted out and who wasn’t invited. There’s speculation about power conference teams, especially on the NCAAT/NIT bubble, but it’s only speculation right now, from what we know. On the one hand, there was rampant speculation last year, and only UNC opted out. On the other, college sports are changing, and the NIT has changed, so precedent can only carry us so far. We’ll monitor the situation, but it’s hard to count out the lower bubble teams right now. Last year, UNC declined their opt-out within an hour or so of the NCAA Tournament’s Selection Show completing. Dayton, dealing with a lot of injuries, announced they wouldn’t accept an invite if invited around the same time. (It’s unclear if Dayton would have been invited. I believe we had them as our projected last team in the field after UNC’s decline, but we are far, far, far from perfect.)

The fourth question is who the NIT selection committee will invite. The NIT Selection Show is tomorrow, Sunday, at 9:30 PM EDT on ESPN2. Here’s where our model thinks the field will land, with one projected bid thief (i.e., one of South Florida/NC State/Oregon/Temple/UAB winning its conference tournament):

Last Four In, First Four Out, Etc.

On the low side:

• Last Four In (from the cut line going upwards): Yale, Florida State, SMU, San Francisco
• First Four Out (from the cut line going downwards): Cornell, Minnesota, St. Bonaventure, UC Irvine
• Others in the mix (>5% NIT chance, below NIT field, not in our field or in the First Four Out): Xavier, UAB, George Mason, Saint Joe’s

On the high side:

• Last Four In (from the cut line going downwards): Indiana State, Providence, Seton Hall, Cincinnati
• First Four Out (from the cut line going upwards): St. John’s, Oklahoma, Northwestern, Mississippi State
• Others in the mix (>10% NIT chance, above NIT field, not in our field or in the First Four Out): [vacant]

As we’ll discuss down below regarding Virginia, our model has a poor track record on the NCAAT/NIT cut line, so take its projections there with a grain of salt. On the NIT/CBI cut line, our model has performed comparably to that of John Templon, who also does NIT Bracketology year-round. His projection is always a great resource. (Thank you to John, by the way, for confirming with the NCAA that Mississippi’s declined automatic bid would stay within the SEC and go to the next team in line, which is looking likely to be Georgia.)

As always, we account for bid thieves by looking at the median cut lines in our model’s simulations. Today, those are 45^th and 82^nd, meaning if there was a master seed list covering both tournaments, the 45^th overall seed would be the last NCAAT at-large and the 82^nd seed would be the last NIT at-large.

Conference Tournament Favorites (Reverse Bid Thieves)

Given where those cut lines stand and how many teams sit between them, we don’t have any reverse bid thieves today. All conference tournament favorites who sit in NIT at-large territory are, in today’s bracketology, not in the NIT. More likely than not, this isn’t what happens. Our last team in the field—Yale—has a median NIT selection rank of 83^rd in our model’s simulations. That implies that bid thievery is likely to impact the NIT. Princeton is only roughly 50/50 to win the Ivy League Tournament. VCU and Duquesne are only a little better than 50/50, combined, to win the A-10 Tournament.

The three current conference tournament favorites in NIT at-large bid territory if they lose:

• Princeton
• Grand Canyon
• VCU

Model Talk: Virginia

The one spot where our model is really out of bounds relative to the consensus is Virginia. We know it’s been underestimating Seton Hall, relative to the consensus. We know it’s been overestimating Texas A&M and Colorado. But as of this morning, the only wild one on our list with major bubble impact is Virginia, who is clearly on the bubble but only labeled as 1.2% likely by our model to make the NIT.

What’s happening with Virginia? Some of it is that Virginia’s Q1 record, 2–6 is just good enough to escape punishable territory with our model’s thresholds. Our model sets the cutoff for Q1 win percentage at .250. At or above that, the model doesn’t have the committee taking notice. Below it, the punishments start to kick in. There’s a reason for this decision—I forget who it was, but I think there was a notable bubble team a few years back with exactly a .250 Q1 win percentage, and they didn’t seem to be punished while a .222 team or something like that was—but the committee is human. It’s inconsistent. Our model forecasts this inconsistency, but in a more blanket way than it probably should. It puts the formula together and slaps one big random number on the end, designed to wobble teams by a seed line or two. We did this for practical reasons—we can get more simulations faster if we lump the uncertainty into one variable instead of isolating it across all the different committee philosophies—but we’re dealing with the fallout with Virginia.

The other part with Virginia, though, is simply perception. Virginia is not a terrible team. They’re only one spot behind Northwestern in the NET rankings, and they’re eleven spots ahead of Seton Hall. NET does a decent job of approximating how good you are, or at least how good you’ve been over the season. Virginia’s résumé is even better. The Hoos have KPI and SOR rankings in the 30s, and even Wins Above Bubble—which is not on the NCAA team sheets but does a good job of approximating the body of work of bubble teams—is 40^th in the country, better than those of Oklahoma, Michigan State, Texas A&M, Boise State, Clemson, Texas, Mississippi State, and fellow bubble teams Seton Hall, Providence, Pitt, and St. John’s. People are sick of Virginia, especially a Virginia that’s played worse down the stretch (kenpom, which shows how good a team is right exactly now, has the Hoos 68^th in the country). But if it’s about who’s accomplished the most, Virginia’s done what it should take in any fair system. If it’s about who’s the best right now, then no, no Virginia in the NCAAT, but that’s not generally how it’s worked, historically.

So, I don’t know about Virginia. I do believe our model is overconfident, though. Time to buy a bigger computer.

The Graveyard

As always, we want to talk about who’s losing what because of the change in the automatic bid rules. We think it’s important to track the real impact of the changes, or at least our closest estimate of that impact. So:

• Losing an automatic bid (teams who would have made it in last year’s format): UC Irvine, High Point, Toledo, Sam Houston State, Eastern Washington, Quinnipiac, Little Rock, Eastern Kentucky, Norfolk State, Central Connecticut State
• Gaining a bid (teams we think are receiving those bids instead): Georgia, LSU, Yale, Florida State, SMU, San Francisco, Boston College, UNLV, Washington, Duquesne
• Losing a home game (teams who would have been seeded and had the option to host last year): NC State, Bradley
• Gaining a home game (hosting the first round in our projection only because of their automatic bid): LSU, Georgia

Not all non-power conference teams are created equal. We believe strongly in the high-major/mid-major/low-major dichotomy (as opposed to calling teams only power conference schools and mid-majors). In total, then, what we have is this:

• Nine NIT spots shifting away from low-majors, with a mid-major losing the tenth. Of those ten lost, five are being picked up by high-majors and five are being picked up by mid-majors.
• One NIT home game shifting away from a mid-major. It goes to a high-major.

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