NIT Bracketology: Where the Bid Thieves Leave the NIT

This is our NIT Bracketology rundown for the morning of Saturday, March 17^th. If you’re looking for the most current rundown, visit our homepage.

A lot happened yesterday. Although…it was only four games. Three shocking games, one minor upset. Together, they turned the picture entirely on its head. It was only four games, really, that shook up the picture. That’s all it was. But given how much it all shook? I think we can call yesterday a lot.

There were more than four games, of course. Upwards of a dozen automatic bids were earned to the NCAA Tournament, each the culmination of a season’s worth of twists and turns, ups and downs. Three expected NCAAT 1-seeds all lost, potentially jostling that picture. It was a busy day, stretching from 11:00 AM Eastern Time well into the night.

But four games told the story.

In one of the first two tip-offs of the day, Brown upset Princeton. The Bears stayed hot, and Princeton’s deliberate comeback got close, but Brown made their free throws and got the stops they had to get. Princeton dropped into the NIT, and while Yale leaves our NIT projection, they’ll be back in it if Brown pulls off the encore. So far, no NIT bid thief here, but Princeton/Yale may combine to become one, and with Princeton projected by our model to take a home game, it may push someone out of that NIT tier as well.

In the mid-afternoon, Temple upset FAU. In Owl-on-Owl conflict, the program under suspicion of point shaving (who we would like to note has suspended nobody in the wake of the accusations) pulled off the shocker. Will FAU fall into the NIT? Maybe. Could UAB make the NIT if Temple does it again? Possibly. Either way, both the NCAAT and the NIT cut lines moved one spot forward.

Then, the evening. NC State over UNC. Oregon over Colorado. As with FAU, there’s a chance Colorado will be a team whose NCAAT bid is stolen here, but again, the NCAAT cut line shifted, and while it doesn’t affect the NIT cut line, it does affect who gets NIT home games, because NC State was expected to open on the road.

In total, the carnage seems to have pushed Oklahoma, Northwestern, Florida Atlantic, Michigan State, TCU, Texas A&M, Colorado, and maybe Mississippi State into danger of missing the NCAA Tournament. It has greatly increased the risk for St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Virginia. It has all but locked Indiana State and Providence into the NIT.

At the bottom of the NIT, we didn’t lose anyone from our projected field. Our model wasn’t expecting this much bid thievery, but it was expecting some, and so its cut line held. That said, Yale beating Cornell kept the Bulldogs in NIT at-large territory, so unlike the A-10 Championship—where VCU will simply swap in for Duquesne if Duquesne wins—the Ivy League Championship could push someone out. Right now, we have Florida State as that at-risk team. Other teams at risk (from Yale or just from a committee whim) include SMU, San Francisco, Boston College, and Appalachian State.

As always, we want to be clear about the shortcomings of our model. It’s been higher than the consensus on Texas A&M, Colorado, and Virginia. It’s been lower than the consensus on Seton Hall. It seems a little lower on Oklahoma and St. John’s? If I were betting my life on this, knowing our model but having followed the industry, I would move Oklahoma up and out of our NIT bracket and pull Virginia down into it. But there are smarter people than me discussing the NCAAT/NIT bubble. Listen to them.

On the lower NIT bubble, John Templon has UC Irvine in the projected field instead of Florida State. Other than that, our disagreements seem to all revolve around the NCAAT/NIT cut line (although he has Virginia in and Oklahoma out, as we would also have if we were doing this independently of our model) and who’ll receive home games. UCF jumps into an automatic home game if Oklahoma stays in the NCAAT, and he has this pushing Princeton out of hosting position, whereas our model would push Seton Hall out of hosting unless they’re one of the NCAA Tournament committee’s First Four Out and therefore an NIT 1-seed. The NIT and the NCAA Tournament selection committees have different tendencies, and the NCAAT’s favor Seton Hall’s while the NIT’s don’t. Still, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the Pirates hosting either way. They and Princeton are very close in our model’s formula.

Below our current projected NIT field, these are the teams we see having an NIT chance, in order of how big that chance is:

• UC Irvine
• Minnesota
• Xavier
• Cornell
• UMass
• Maryland
• George Mason
• UAB
• Saint Joe’s
• St. Bonaventure
• North Texas
• Penn State

Nobody outside of these twelve and the Memphis/Mississippi/Indiana combo (the teams whose coaches have said or reportedly said they don’t want to play in the NIT) made the NIT from below in any of our model’s simulations overnight. We don’t expect a ton of declined NIT bids, but if the doomsayers turn out correct, we could conceivably see teams like Santa Clara, Louisiana Tech, Northern Iowa, Charlotte, High Point, Western Carolina, UNC Wilmington, Belmont, and Hofstra come under consideration. That is intentionally a very large list, but there’s still a possibility we’ll miss someone. The NIT committee has changed things up over the years. That list is based off our best estimation of the approach over the last two years.

Here’s this morning’s projected bracket. We’ll update our NIT Bracketology page if Brown beats Yale. We’ll update it again if Duquesne beats VCU. We will have a new post up with a new bracketology after the NCAA Tournament Selection Show, which will tell us not only who got pulled out of the NIT from above, but who our NIT 1-seeds are. Shortly after the NIT Selection Show, our NIT Bracket Challenge will open up for entries and we’ll post about how the NIT format changes affected the eventual field. We will not be updating our probabilities until morning. As always, you can get at everything we have on our homepage, and we’ll be posting a whole bunch on Twitter.

Bona NIT.

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