The bracket below is our best current prediction of the final NIT bracket. It is predictive of where things will end up. It is not a reflection of where things currently stand. (Update: With selection happening today, it is now a reflection of where things stand.)
The bracket below is also objective. We are not making choices based on our opinions of various teams. Our college basketball model simulates the remainder of the season 10,000 times, including the selection process and postseason tournaments. It gives us the likeliest upper cut line (accounting for bid thieves), the likeliest lower cut lines (accounting for reverse bid thieves), and each team’s median position on each committee’s seed list. With that information, we build the bracket based on our best understanding of the bracketing principles. Here is how the model works, in full detail.
If you notice any irregularities or have questions of any sort, please contact me through the information available on our about page or on twitter: @joestunardi.
- If you want NCAA Tournament Bracketology, we have that too.
- If you want NIT Bubble Watch, we also have that.
- If you want our model’s probabilities concerning each team’s tournament chances, we have those as well.
- Regions are ordered as follows: first overall seed; fourth overall seed; second overall seed; third overall seed.
- Asterisks denote automatic bid recipients.
- For First Four Out and other bracket context, check out all our NIT posts.
Last Updated: Sunday 3/17 – post-NCAA Tournament Selection Show, post St. John’s & Pitt opt-outs
Oklahoma Region
| 1. Oklahoma* |
| SMU |
| 4. Washington* |
| San Francisco |
| 3. Princeton |
| Syracuse |
| 2. Villanova* |
| VCU |
Wake Forest Region
| 1. Wake Forest* |
| Appalachian State |
| 4. Georgia* |
| UCF |
| 3. Iowa* |
| Bradley |
| 2. Cincinnati* |
| Loyola (IL) |
Seton Hall Region
| 1. Seton Hall |
| Florida State |
| 4. LSU* |
| South Florida |
| 3. Utah* |
| UNLV |
| 2. Providence* |
| Boston College |
Indiana State Region
| 1. Indiana State |
| Minnesota |
| 4. Kansas State |
| UC Irvine |
| 3. Virginia Tech* |
| Richmond |
| 2. Ohio State* |
| Butler |
Can you confirm or deny that the committee got far enough down the list for Bonaventure to get invited?
ESPN reported it tonight and we haven’t seen anyone deny. We don’t know what the process looked like, so we don’t know when they were called, but they should have known on Saturday that they’d be somewhere around the NIT bubble, which makes a conventional denial sound pretty plausible to us.
Let’s go SMU!
UC Bearcats coach Wes Miller (Miller Lite) will be entering his 4th season this Fall with zero NCAA tourney appearances. And he’s 0-3 against crosstown rival Xavier. UC fans should get used to NIT appearances (or maybe beg Mick Cronin to return to U-Clifton).
UCF needs a home game, hopefully against SFU. I want them to know how much we left them in our dust when we went to the 12.
I’m hoping my Indiana State Sycamores make the NIT as a #1 seed, as opposed to being a play-in team in the NCAA Tournament. I think we could win the whole thing this year and we’d never even have to leave the state of Indiana since the NIT Final 4 is in Indianapolis this year.
Sycamores play like they are capable and yes they could win it all 🙂
They are guaranteed a 1 seed
Is Georgia in since Mississippi isn’t taking a bid?
Yes. SEC will still get two automatic bids to the NIT even if Mississippi declines an invite. The official statement was: “Based on principles and procedures, the bid would go to the next eligible SEC team by NET.” The next team by NET here is Georgia.
Ole Miss has said they would opt out/not accept an NIT invite.
Yeah, sad for that fanbase. They haven’t gotten to play in the postseason much lately. Thanks for making sure we knew. We’ll have them out of the bracket in the morning.
NIT changes their policy so that they could allow more Power 5 Teams in and Ole Miss declines. Meanwhile Mid-major auto-bids are ignored. This could blow up in their face.
Now we get 6-12 (17-16) Georgia with 100 Net rating? Awesome. If SEC teams keep declining there will still hope for Missouri at 0-18 in conference!
I would think XAVIER would be in. Yes, a few bad losses, but Look at whom they’ve defeated.
They’ve got great numbers, but the NIT committee hasn’t selected a sub-.500 team as an at-large in the time we’ve been covering the NIT. It’s possible this will be the year it changes, but we’ve said that a lot of times the past few years.
Losing record
But they destroyed your “Cats
They sure did. Five years in a row & counting. UC fans have never recovered from the Bob Huggins false idol worship of the 90s.
Do you expect any teams to opt out? Like UNC did last season.
We don’t really know. It’s pretty rare for that to happen, historically. UNC was the first true opt-out in a really long time. Penny Hardaway said today that he doesn’t want Memphis to play in it, so it’s possible the committee might not invite Memphis, but we haven’t heard anything official on that front, and we haven’t heard anything elsewhere yet either. Hopefully, the backlash to that move by UNC will keep teams in it.
What is the point of the regular season for “Mid-Majors” now that the NCAA has removed all small conference champions the right to play in a post season tournament (that they don’t have to pay for). Is the CBI or CIT doing anything for any of the #1 seeds that will no longer have a chance for a bid to the NIT?
Hope Indiana St makes the NCAA and Appalachian St makes the NIT
I’m not sure if the CIT is back this year or not, and I don’t know whether the CBI or CIT is specifically making an effort to recruit regular season conference champions. I will say, since you asked: There are a lot of things to play for in college sports beyond the national championship (and in college basketball’s case, the NIT). There are rivalries. There’s personal pride. The conference championship itself, over the regular season, is a huge accomplishment in every league, and it remains that even without an NIT bid as a reward. We really liked the 2006–2023 system and are sad to see it go, but I’m unaware of non-power conference teams working any less hard or caring any less without the NIT as an incentive.
For what it’s worth, we’ve started tracking the impact of the format’s change in our daily NIT Bracketology rundown (link below to this morning’s). As of this morning, the five slots that would have gone to automatic bid teams are instead projected to go to Duquesne, San Francisco, VCU, NC State, and Appalachian State. Those teams would not have been in our bracketology this morning in the old format, and all of Bradley, Loyola, and South Florida would be much more on the bubble. The benefits of the change aren’t only flowing to power conference teams.
https://thebarkingcrow.com/nit-bracketology-the-indiana-state-question/
The CBI and CIT are both running post-season tournaments this year and any #1 seeds that lost in the conference tournaments that don’t get NIT invites will be in one tournament or the other. The only problem with those tournaments is there is an entry fee, $27,500 in the CBI and while the CIT technically doesn’t have a fee to enter if you want to host you have to pay $30,000. So because of that you see a lot of schools decline even though by record or performance should be playing in the post-season.
I did not know the CIT was back, but you are correct! The first year after Covid they changed their name to “the basketball classic”, planned on having 32 teams, and only managed to find 23 I believe, willing to play. Looks like 16 teams get in, and it is needed, after what the NIT did to screw over the mid-majors
It just so happens that the year the NCAA/NIT remove conference champions the honor of getting an automatic bid to the NIT, (21) No. 1 seeds lose in a conference tournament this postseason.
In my opinion, this has diluted the NCAA tourney field so much that this will be the worst field in NCAA recent memory.
Do you think the new NIT rules, along with all the bid thieves going into the NCAA field will now improve the NIT tourney field, even with teams like Memphis and Ole Miss (possibly more) declining a bid since the it has become an NCAA or bust mentality within division one schools?
Feel bad for all the mid-major conference winners getting caught up by the NCAA greed – power conference teams in the post season make more money for the NCAA.
E. Kentucky, E. Washington, High Point, UC Irvine, Sam Houston, Quinnipiac, Norfolk St., Toledo, CCSU, – great seasons – you were given the bird by the new NCAA/NIT rules
Indiana St., Princeton, Appalachian St. and Richmond – hope sucess in the “NEW” NIT
Although you have points nobody was watching the smaller schools in the NIT
At some point business decisions are necessary
They tried the other way and it got so bad the the tournament is no longer at MSG
We have really mixed feelings about it. We don’t know if the NIT could have continued without making the pivot, given the pressure from the power conferences and Fox Sports, but there was an elegance to the old system, and we’re sad for those schools you listed. (We don’t begrudge anyone trying to make a buck, but low-major conferences chase TV money by having conference tournaments, and it sometimes hurts their more deserving champions. We respect leagues like the WAC making such an effort to get their best team the automatic bid. Sometimes, conference tournaments are very unfair.)
It does seem people are really excited about this projected field, relative to other years. We’ll see whether any upper bubble teams opt out, but if it ends up around this? It’ll be a very fun first round.