Opt-Outs, a Sub-.500 Team, a Controversial Format, and…the Best NIT in Years?

We have our NIT Bracket. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the link.

It was a fairly major story this fall when the NCAA announced it would be changing the NIT format. Gone were the old automatic bids, the ones in use since 2006* which went to regular season conference champions who didn’t receive NCAA Tournament bids. In were new automatic bids, given to power conference teams and decided by NET and accompanied by a guaranteed home game. Under pressure from those power conferences and the threat of a competitor tournament put on by Fox Sports, the NCAA changed its approach, pivoting to something more familiar to 90’s NIT fans: A tournament field with an eye on the ratings. There was a lot of disagreement about the wisdom of this, the necessity of this, and the nuts and bolts of the approach. To recap our stance:

• It makes us sad.
• We think the change was probably one of the best ways available to ensure the NIT’s survival.
• We think the magnitude of the change and who was affected were misrepresented by a lot of college basketball media. Some mid-majors, as we’ll see in a minute, were helped. The change was significant, but not transformative.
• If they’re going to have the power conference automatic bids, we wish they’d use conference standings or a résumé metric rather than NET to determine who receives them.
• We think the NIT will have better first round matchups because of this, and probably better second round matchups as well.
• We don’t think this changes the overall identity of the NIT in a seismic way. Again: Not transformative. The NIT still is what it is.

Today was the first time we saw the new system at play, and it came with a twist: In addition to the new system, this was the first year opt-outs were common. Opt-outs had bounced around in the past, sometimes evident and sometimes possibly happening behind the scenes but usually not happening at all. This year, we got a decent number. The result was a final NIT bracket that was harder to predict than, say, last year’s.

*We don’t know for sure that the automatic bid system started in 2006. That’s our impression, from examining past brackets.

Who Would Have Made the NIT Field With Last Year’s Automatic Bids

By my quick count, there would have been 15 automatic NIT bids this year under the previous system. This would have been a large number, and possibly a record, but it wasn’t totally beyond the pall. The last few years, we spent most of the season expecting 12 or 13 and ultimately getting something like 9 or 10.

Of those 15, six still made the NIT:

• Appalachian State
• Indiana State
• Princeton
• Richmond
• South Florida
• UC Irvine

Those six didn’t end up needing the automatic bid. Here are the nine who didn’t make the cut:

• Central Connecticut State
• Eastern Kentucky
• Eastern Washington
• High Point
• Little Rock
• Norfolk State
• Quinnipiac
• Sam Houston State
• Toledo

Those are the nine we’re sad for. It was the wrong year, and it stinks.

Who Opted Out of This Year’s NIT, How It Shook Out

With opt-outs, it’s a little more vague. These are the teams we know with certainty opted out of the NIT, and whom we’re nearly 100% confident were going to receive an invitation had they not individually opted out:

• Oklahoma
• Pitt
• St. John’s
• Washington
• Mississippi
• Syracuse
• Memphis
• Indiana

In addition to these eight, we were surprised to not see Florida State ultimately in the field, but it’s possible we just got that one wrong.

Washington and Mississippi’s opt-outs were notable because they involved the schools declining automatic bids. Mississippi’s came earlier, and it was evident fairly quickly that LSU and Georgia were both interested in playing, something which eventually got Georgia into the field (LSU made it independently of Ole Miss). Washington’s came later and more quietly, and it’s unclear to us if the NIT committee tried to find a Pac-12 replacement for Washington or not. The next teams up, by NET, were USC, UCLA, Stanford, and Cal. USC finished 15–18 after battling injuries all year, and has an NBA-interested roster. Mick Cronin at UCLA said weeks ago he didn’t want to play in the NIT, but UCLA finished 16–17 anyway and wouldn’t have been near the NIT at-large picture even if that was 17–16 (don’t worry, we’ll get to Xavier). Stanford just fired Jerod Haase after a 14–18 campaign. Cal had an encouraging first season under 2023 NIT hero Mark Madsen…and finished 13–19. Did the NIT committee try to find a Pac-12 replacement and get turned down by all four of these schools plus Arizona State and Oregon State? Or did the NIT committee receive Washington’s opt-out and pass? We don’t know, and if it was indeed the latter, we don’t know whether the Pac-12’s disintegration played a role. You can probably do things to the Pac-12 right now that you wouldn’t get away with doing to the SEC.

In the end, there were eleven automatic NIT bids this year. Not twelve. This is not a great look for the new system, but it might result in some fine-tuning of that rule. If it’s going to exist, the automatic bid should only be offered to one team. If they turn it down? No automatic bid. Sorry, Georgia. (Georgia might have then made it anyway as an at-large.) Hopefully the Fox Sports threat has been thwarted enough for the NIT to be able to reassert itself a little on this front.

Who Made the NIT Because of All of This

This leaves 17 spots vacated, either forcibly (through the removal of the old automatic bids) or voluntarily (through teams opting out). We will say: Mississippi was only making the NIT as an automatic bid. Indiana was only making the NIT because of the removal of the old automatic bids. Washington, Memphis, and Syracuse would all have been NIT bubble teams in the old system, but with 15 automatic bids, at least Washington probably would have been out. Really, we had only 14 spots vacated, and I’m not so sure it wouldn’t have been twelve. (I’m not confident Syracuse and Memphis would have made an NIT in the old system without opt-outs.)

Here’s our best guess at who took those 14 spots. It’s only a guess, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark.

• Butler
• VCU
• UNLV
• Loyola (IL)
• San Francisco
• Boston College
• SMU
• Minnesota
• Cornell
• LSU
• Georgia
• Saint Joseph’s
• North Texas
• Xavier

It’s tricky to separate who’s in because of an opt-out from who’s in because of the removal of the old automatic bids. It all happened in the same soup. But what we have here is this:

• Seven high-majors declined NIT invitations (or requested to not be invited). One mid-major joined them in this. Given four of the high-majors wouldn’t have received NIT invitations were the automatic bid rules still in place, we’ll call this a loss of four high-majors to opt-outs and a loss of one mid-major.
• Seven low-majors and two mid-majors were kept out by the removal of the old automatic bid rule.
• Eight mid-majors and six high-majors made the NIT after the opt-outs and old automatic bids were removed.

Under the old system, the NIT would have—by our best estimation, having not seen an official seed list—consisted of 15 high-majors, ten mid-majors, and seven low-majors. First round home games would have gone to 13 of the high-majors and three of the mid-majors. Instead, this NIT consists of 17 high-majors and 15 mid-majors, and that’s counting Cornell and UC Irvine both as mid-majors rather than low-majors, something that is a very blurry distinction with those two. Home games? 13 to high-majors. Three to mid-majors. The same as it would have been.

What we had then, primarily, was a shift not from mid-majors to high-majors but from low-majors to mid-majors. Eastern Kentucky didn’t give up its spot so much for Xavier as it did for Cornell. This is still a bit of “littler guy yields to bigger guy,” but it’s different from how the change is described.

That said, this would have been different had there been no opt-outs.

Here’s the breakdown of the field in three scenarios: One is our best guess at how it would have looked with last year’s rules. One is the real world. The one in between is the real world but if those teams hadn’t opted out:

	High	Mid	Low
Old	15	10	7
No Opt-Outs	21	11	0
Real World	17	15	0

There are a few ways to take this:

One is to say that the opt-outs are solving a lot of the problem. If we use a binary distinction rather than a trinary one, there was hardly any change in the composition of the NIT.

Another is to say that this is a travesty, that low-majors are out in the wind. I’m sympathetic to this view, and I don’t begrudge anyone who holds it. It’s sad when things are taken away. But the NCAA tried the old format, and after 18 years, average sports fans didn’t like the result. All the love in the world to Central Connecticut State, but more people will watch Georgia play Xavier. Division I is really, really big. That causes some pain points. 32 teams is not very many for a postseason tournament trying to represent all of Division I.

A third is to say that this has gone a little too far, and that if the opt-outs get calmed down, the NIT is going to be too heavily weighted towards high-majors. Perhaps this field’s final composition—nearly a 50/50 split between power conference and non-power conference teams—is a good example of how viewers want the NIT to look. Excitement seems rather high, relative to most years. That’s what our early data is indicating, as one of the very few NIT-centric media outlets in the business. It’s early, but NIT Bracket Challenge entries are up 33% compared to where they stood at this hour last year, and that’s coming off a year in which our site’s NIT Bracketology traffic plateaued year-over-year for the first time.

Overall? I’m personally in favor of letting the format play out for another year. Let’s gather more data. Formats can always change. (We’ll talk about the opt-outs more down below.)

Xavier, Saint Joe’s, North Texas, Florida State

The biggest piece of evidence suggesting Florida State opted out is that Xavier made the NIT. In our years covering this (nearly a decade now), we haven’t seen a sub-.500 team make the field. Xavier finished 16–17. If a willing 17–16 ACC team was there, we think the committee would have taken them. We aren’t positive about this, but it’s the direction in which we lean.

One theory, though, about why they didn’t:

The St. John’s, Pitt, and Oklahoma opt-outs came very late in the process. It’s possible Syracuse did too. Maybe those schools had already communicated their decision, earlier in the week, but with Oklahoma in particular, the presence in the NIT picture at all was such a shock that it’s possible the school was caught by surprise, and that the NIT found out at the eleventh hour. Cornell made sense as an addition beyond the teams in our bracketology. Saint Joe’s, North Texas, and Xavier were each a shock. The theory, then, is that these teams were not picked because they were closest to the NIT in the seed list, but instead because NIT selection committee members could get in touch with them quickly, smoothly, and privately, to plug holes.

It’s possible Saint Joe’s and North Texas have a strong case if you look from one particular angle. We’ll spend some time this offseason looking for that angle. It’s possible the NIT really is done holding sub-.500 teams out. But it was weird to see those three teams included. Frankly, with the Hawks and the Mean Green among the first four teams announced on the selection show, we were panicking a little here at The Barking Crow. Once we saw Providence pop up as a 3-seed, we knew a lot of 1 and 2-seeds had held and that the tournament was fine, but it was a scary minute.

Opt-Out Thoughts, the Sub-.500 Thing, and What’s Next for the NIT

Should teams be able to make the NIT with sub-.500 records?

This was an early bone of contention between ourselves and John Templon, a wonderful counterpart over at nitbracketology.com. Back in what I believe was 2020, our model had sub-.500 teams making the field, and John kept telling us no, and John was proven very much correct (I think the proving came in 2022). I don’t know John’s opinion on whether sub-.500 teams should be allowed into the NIT. Myself? I think they should be.

Wins and losses matter. I’ll never argue against that. But in a sport with schedules as disparate as those of college basketball teams, wins and losses must be viewed in the context of the strength of the schedule. Xavier played four games this year against teams who went on to be 1-seeds in the NCAA Tournament. They played ten games against teams seeded on the NCAA Tournament’s first five lines. They played six games against the Big East’s three bubble teams—Villanova, St. John’s, and Marquette. They played Cincinnati, one of the strongest teams left out of the NCAA Tournament field. Aside from Georgetown and DePaul, they only played two games this season against teams with kenpom rankings in the worse half of Division I. Going 16–17 against that’s not too shabby. Xavier was 77^th in both Strength of Record and Wins Above Bubble. The NIT cut line ended up somewhere in the upper 80’s. We’re ok with Xavier playing in the NIT.

Opt-outs? We don’t support those, and while this is kind of an easy thing to do, because we’re an NIT blog, we’d point out that of the eight programs we know opted out, most are currently struggling. Memphis just played a soap opera of a season. Oklahoma’s fanbase is at odds with Porter Moser to the point where the prospect of him fleeing for the DePaul job was believable. Indiana continues to underperform its talent, for a long time this year not even looking like an NIT candidate. Chris Beard’s name is all over the place in coaching rumors after just one season at Mississippi, who stuck its neck out to hire him less than twelve months ago. Rick Pitino called this season the most unenjoyable experience of his life. Jeff Capel? This was the best Pitt team he’s had in six years. It only received an NIT invitation. Washington fired Mike Hopkins. Syracuse fans are grappling with the fear that their basketball reputation will go the way of Nebraska football.

The point I’m making here is that the NIT isn’t declined by programs who are thriving. It’s declined by programs who are struggling. Of these eight, I do think St. John’s, Syracuse, Mississippi, and Pitt had encouraging seasons in some form. But they weren’t the seasons Indiana State, Providence, or even Ohio State had. Healthy programs don’t decline NIT bids.

I’d also like to point out that the reputations of some of these coaches are far from sterling. Rick Pitino. Chris Beard. Penny Hardaway. Jeff Capel. The offenses range from annoying (Capel) to allegedly heinous (Beard), but there’s a common thread: These aren’t names that command a lot of respect. I don’t have a shred of disrespect towards Red Autry. I’m merely uneasy about Porter Moser (he reportedly really wanted the Notre Dame job last offseason, which makes it fair to ask why he doesn’t just leave Norman and get it over with). My disrespect towards Mike Woodson is not anything related to his character. (Mike Woodson seems like a good enough guy. He just doesn’t seem to “get” college basketball. His teams are talented but play sloppy, uninspired hoops. This is not a problem more recruiting time will solve.) Pitino? Beard? Hardaway? Even Capel…These aren’t main characters the NIT will necessarily miss. The absence is not the problem. It’s the reputational slap in the face.

Finally, I’d like to point out that some of these guys are more noteworthy recruiters than coaches. Less practice and more recruiting might actually be a good strategy for Penny Hardaway. Of course they view it this way. Their job is not to coach these kids. It’s to assemble a strong roster.

Two things are receiving the blame for the opt-outs, and I think they’re accurate: The first is the continued diminishment of the NIT’s prestige. This ebbs and flows, but it’s undeniable. The tournament is not what it was in 1938. It has slowly slipped from its highest peaks. The second is that the transfer portal is already open, as I type this. This is odd. It seems like an unforced error by the NCAA. Is there a legal reason to do it this way? Because it hurts the NCAA Tournament, too. Not by pulling teams out of it, but by distracting a little bit.

The second should be easy to fix if it’s legally fixable. (And things are often legal if no one objects, even if they’d be illegal if they ever found their way through court.) Transfer portal timing should move. The media will probably push hard for this, because it’ll make their lives easier in weeks like this one. It’s also just a good idea. NFL Free Agency doesn’t start after Sunday Night Football in Week 18. Why in the world did the transfer portal open tonight?

The first is harder. The NIT’s faded a bit, and it’s continuing to fade. The Madison Square Garden split hurt. I still don’t know who left whom, but my assumption is that MSG was ready to move on, and that the move was accelerated by Covid forcing absences from MSG in 2020 and 2021 and probably thinning the crowd some in 2022. Would St. John’s have played this year if the NIT Final Four was at its “home” arena? Maybe. Regardless, it hurts the cause. If tournament expansion doesn’t come with losers of play-in games relegated to the NIT, the situation could get a little worse still. Not substantially, but another little bit worse. Add in Dan Gavitt’s comments last fall about the NCAA not being obligated to keep running the NIT, and…it’s not a happy situation.

And yet.

People really don’t like seeing others say they’re too good for the NIT.

Tom Crean’s comments tonight, blasting coaches for turning their backs on some of their players’ last games? Those resonated.

UNC’s opt-out last year, one apparently sparked by locker room discord? That got a backlash.

Coaches often gush about how the NIT matters, like a dad talking about how it matters to go to church. Scott Drew spoke glowingly about the NIT to Stu last year in Las Vegas. Grant McCasland finished that same NIT before formally accepting the Texas Tech job.

People care about the NIT.

College basketball is a silly, silly sport. Its championship format makes no sense, and yet the NCAA Tournament is breathlessly entertaining. The concept that Division I includes both North Carolina and Fairleigh Dickinson is laughable, and yet it makes the sport what it is. Somewhere in this tapestry, the NIT has to exist. If there were no NIT, there would be something lacking when teams missed the NCAA Tournament. There would be something lacking on the Tuesday and Thursday before the Final Four. The sport would be lesser. A little thinner. A little less itself.

We’re very excited for this particular NIT. Hinkle Fieldhouse is a temple to the sport of basketball. Indianapolis is a city that loves hosting things in the middle of a state that adores basketball. I believe seven teams in this NIT hail from within a three-hour drive of Indianapolis, with six of those seven among the 16 seeded teams in the tournament. If things break well for the NIT, this could be the NIT Championship’s first packed arena in years, and the rounds leading up to it are loaded with storylines ranging from a rekindled Loyola/Bradley rivalry to the continuation of the young Jake Diebler era. The field is deep, and its stars are plentiful. We have never expected as big of things from an NIT as we expect from this one.

Will that help? I think so. I think people like competitive basketball. That’s the thing that really bothers so many of us when these teams decline NIT invitations. They’re declining the opportunity to compete, to play another game. College basketball isn’t a networking exercise. It’s a sport. The thing to do is play it.

Plenty more from us, serious and fun and both, as the tournament goes on. Bona NIT.