One of the hardest things about NIT blogging is knowing what does and what does not help a team’s chances of making the NIT. Part of the NIT’s elegance is that it’s not like those other tournaments. It’s not subject to the brutish “win and you’re in” logic. We have class here, and taste, and sometimes, it’s good to lose a little to accomplish your ultimate goals. You know what we call people who never lose in life? Spoiled brats. Contrary to a popular insult hurled our way regarding participation trophies, the NIT requires that you build some character.
Still, it’s difficult to parse individual results. So, in a week of customary college basketball chaos, in an effort to help both fans and those young bucks trying to break into this NIT blogging industry (please don’t do that, there is not enough room for one of us in here), here are which results helped teams’ quests to make the NIT, and which did NOT:
Washington losing to Michigan: NOT
This was a football game.
Bill Belichick leaving the Patriots: NOT
Again, there is no basketball involved here.
Nick Saban leaving Alabama: Maybe?
In a roundabout way (Alabama football gets worse, enthusiasm for Alabama athletics donations wanes and/or is triaged even more towards the football program, Alabama struggles to keep Nate Oats when the next suitor comes calling), I think this could help Alabama make the NIT? It’s not entirely without impact. But this is really a stretch.
Nebraska beating Purdue: NOT
Here we go. Nebraska beating Purdue was BAD for Nebraska. B. A. D. Bad. These guys were looking not only like contenders for an NIT bid, but like they could win an NIT championship. Now, someone else gets to smile when Keisei Tominaga drops 20 in March. (Or, Nebraska backslides into the NIT and makes it but not with any of the joy we were expecting them to bring to the proceedings.)
UCF beating Kansas: NIT
A good one! UCF was in a tricky spot when we ran our bracketology yesterday. They made our projected field, but only through one of those newfangled automatic bids for the two top-ranked teams, by NET, in each Power Six conference (ignoring, of course, those already sentenced to an appearance in the NCAA T*urnament). They were aimed towards a losing overall record, which may or may not make only an automatic bid possible. In other words, they had space above them and not below them. They used some of that space.
Mississippi State beating Tennessee: NOT
Mississippi State has been a steady presence in our corner of the world these last few years, playing in the 2021 and 2022 NITs and spending considerable time in the picture in 2020 and 2023. This year, many are saying Starkville can’t hang with the NITe-life offered by places like Los Angeles and Manhattan (Kansas). Those many look even more right after what transpired last night in the Oktibbeha County seat. This team just might not be NIT material. Which is ok—it’s ok to not be great—but is a letdown for a program that came so close to winning it all three years ago.
Ohio State losing to Wisconsin: NIT
While we don’t know what the NIT Selection Committee will do about at-large contenders with overall losing records (this is what kept the Buckeyes out last year), that shouldn’t be an issue for this team. They took care of business against Central and Western Michigan. They’re cruising on the win–loss front.
Where Ohio State is not cruising is in the arenas of 1) playing good basketball and 2) winning at home. Their best home win is still either Minnesota or Rutgers, two teams still projecting to land below the NIT cut line themselves. There’s time to fix number 1 and to also not do it too soon. You feel me? Ohio State can keep playing bad for a bit, keep failing to protect their home court, and then pull it together and make a run in March. The right kind of run. You know what I mean.
Butler beating Marquette: NOT
This would have firmly landed on the NIT side of the scale if Butler were playing Marquette at home. On the road, though? This was a risky maneuver. We still believe Butler will ultimately earn itself a chance to become the first program to win an NIT on its home court (this is not true, St. John’s has done it many times), but this was overzealous of the Bulldogs.
Miami losing to Louisville: NIT
Yes!! Brilliant work, Miami. Team of the NITe. They did it at home, too! It had been years since Louisville won a road game. Plural! Miami became that road game. Incredible work.
(As a side note: When I protested the other Final Four last year outside the Houston Texans’ stadium, Miami fans were most offended by my presence. UConn fans were unbothered. FAU fans were curious what the NIT is. San Diego State fans were respectful. But Miami fans wanted to scrap—with words, of course—and I think they knew. I think deep down they knew that they were far from done with the likes of me. Welcome back, you sneaky private-school punks.)
Cal beating Colorado: NIT
Is Mark Madsen at it already?
The Golden Bears won their second straight last night, dealing Colorado a solid in the process as the Buffaloes look to pull a Bobby Hurley. Cal started 2–5, and they lost to Pacific, Montana State, and UTEP in those games, and they’re still probably pretty bad. They are not on the NIT radar. But it definitely helped, and ahead of a trip to face Oregon this weekend, it might be time to buy on Berkeley before the price gets too high. Mark Madsen brought Utah Valley to the brink of an NIT championship. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Indiana State losing to Drake: NIT
Drake beating Indiana State: NIT
Can both the Missouri Valley’s best teams make the NIT? It’s going to take an act of contortion I’m not sure the beautiful people of Des Moines and Terre Haute are flexible enough to pull off. Basically, both need to have great seasons, and then both need to go down at Arch Madness. They do call it Arch Madness for a reason, but it’s a lot to ask. In the meantime, great move by each of them to pivot to the center last night. Always fun to see a good Tucker DeVries game, too.
James Franklin, James Harbaugh, and Other Contenders for the Alabama Job
Thanks to the work of ESPN’s Pete Thamel, we got a quick lesson last night in the buyout costs of various big-name contracts in college football. We also had the chance to giggle a little bit at the thought of these coaches’ agents strategically leaking their clients’ buyout numbers. Kind of like how it works when the homecoming queen dances with a nerd in the movies, few things seem to more reliably draw lucrative extensions in college football than the possibility of a bigger program wanting your guy.
Poor James Franklin took the brunt of this giggling, mostly because ESPN’s Pete Thamel added his name and buyout four minutes after his initial tweet was published:
I don’t actually think James Franklin is a bad coach, or that he’d be a bad coach at Alabama for a few years. Penn State seems like a more isolated version of Notre Dame or Michigan, and Franklin has consistently produced top-ten teams there. Following Nick Saban sounds really hard, and Alabama might want a shorter-term guy who can avoid a huge drop-off while they wait for a clear rockstar to emerge. Franklin fits that bill? He seems really low-risk.
Anyway, I don’t know what Alabama wants or who Alabama can afford. I do know about who’d be funny, though. An incomplete list:
1. Mike Norvell. “We took your playoff spot. Now we’re taking your coach. And guess what else? We’re never going to let you into the SEC.” Unprovoked bullying is sometimes the funniest kind.
2. Jim Harbaugh. Can you imagine the plot twist? Harbaugh announces he is indeed leaving Michigan, only to…stay in college football? Go coach the team he just beat? It would be weird, but there’s probably a universe in which Harbaugh says, “I’m worried Ann Arbor will institute too many restrictions on at-home chicken farming, and I really need some security for my hens. Tuscaloosa will never infringe on this right of mine. Not if I win!”
3. Dabo Swinney. This is the same idea as the Franklin move but in a much more panicked way. It would have made more sense, perhaps, if Dan Lanning strung Alabama along for a while, getting himself a big raise from Oregon, but even with Lanning so rapidly saying no: Can’t you see Alabama leaders starting to sweat if this doesn’t go smoothly? Can’t you see them somehow getting to the place where they decide to go with the guy they would have hired if this happened in 2019? As plenty have pointed out, Alabama has done a lot of dumb things in its history. Just because they landed Nick Saban does not mean they are not a blood relative to Auburn, or a similar school in a lot of ways to Texas A&M.
4. Hugh Freeze. Sorry, Auburn made me think of it. This would be a good gag. Might not be the worst move, either. I don’t think Freeze would win a national championship or anything at Alabama, but if they can’t find a great next coach, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to try to beat up their little brother for sport.
5. Brian Kelly. If you thought James Franklin jokes were fun…
Marquette’s Gonna Be Fine (I Hope)
As someone who has invested a lot of energy in saying that 1) Texas will make our beloved NIT and 2) Shaka Smart won’t, Texas grabbing a nice road win at Cincinnati right before Marquette lost that home game to Butler was…not great. This is the problem with being an NIT blogger and also an Austinite Shaka Smart loyalist. You want to be proven right, but to be proven right, you have to play by everybody else’s rules. At some point, this all stops making sense.
Thankfully, UConn started Big East play last year even worse than this. And it got worse! They eventually ended the year by winning an exhibition game in a football stadium, but everybody seemed to think really highly of them doing that. Maybe Shaka Smart can do the same.
Aaron Rodgers vs. His Own Actions
The Aaron Rodgers vs. Jimmy Kimmel saga came to yet another conclusion today, with one final Rodgers appearance before he goes off to read all the books he stacked around him in his Zoom background. With this controversy (maybe) dying down for a moment, let’s recap. Here’s my understanding of what happened between Jimmy Kimmel and Aaron Rodgers:
- A few years ago, Aaron Rodgers did that thing where he kept saying he’d been “immunized” when he wasn’t vaccinated against Covid. As is often the case with Aaron Rodgers, he was a little bit of a dick about this: He didn’t make clear that he was unvaccinated; he acted like he was smarter than everyone else; etc. Jimmy Kimmel made jokes about this at the time.
- This past February, Aaron Rodgers talked on the Pat McAfee Show about how the “Epstein Client List” might soon be released, in a response to what was then the latest round of UFO talk. (“There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in the world,” Rodgers said, as his segue into Jeffrey Epstein.) Kimmel soon aired the clip, and as is often the case with Jimmy Kimmel, he was a little bit of a dick about it: He blamed Rodgers’s (and McAfee’s?) mental state on concussions; he did a giddy little smirk while he waited for people to laugh; etc.
- Last week, McAfee cohost AJ Hawk made a joke to Rodgers on air about the Epstein list, to which Rodgers responded: “There’s a lot of people—including Jimmy Kimmel—who are really hoping that doesn’t come out.” McAfee made some effort to give context in the moment, but as Rodgers should have predicted (and maybe did predict), many eagerly took this as Rodgers accusing Kimmel of being a pedophile. Among those who took it that way? Kimmel, who threatened to sue Rodgers and said Rodgers had put Kimmel’s family in danger.
- Monday night, Kimmel spent his monologue criticizing Rodgers.
- Tuesday, Rodgers made his weekly appearance on the McAfee Show and said that 1) he hadn’t accused Kimmel of being a pedophile; 2) that he meant Kimmel didn’t want the Epstein list to come out because Kimmel had made fun of Rodgers for believing in the existence of such a list (i.e., Rodgers would be proven right and Kimmel would be proven wrong); and 3) that he wasn’t going to apologize and would like to move on. He said other things as well (including that Kimmel just reads his writers’ jokes off a teleprompter), but those were his points specifically on the front of whether or not he thinks Kimmel is what Rodgers called “a P-word.” He then tried to relitigate the entirety of the Covid vaccine debate most of us would like to move on from.
- Yesterday, reports emerged that Rodgers would no longer be on the Pat McAfee Show this football season, and that he had previously been scheduled to appear through the playoffs. McAfee denied this later part, saying Rodgers was done for the year but that this had always been the plan. Then, McAfee invited Rodgers on today to talk briefly about Nick Saban and Bill Belichick in a move that somehow worked perfectly (for now) and made it look like 1) Rodgers was now actually done for the year but 2) ESPN hadn’t caved to Kimmel and canceled his appearance outright. I’m sure everyone will be upset about this, but I think McAfee threaded the needle. He may just be a very smart guy. (Shocking when these hugely successful people are smart. Wonder what the connection is there.)
Between Rodgers and Kimmel…It’s hard to find a good guy.
Obviously, if you imply someone is a pedophile, and specifically imply that they’re a Jeffrey Epstein-associated pedophile, that person is going to become the target of some very impassioned people who spend way too much time on The Internet. If you’re going to make that joke—as Aaron Rodgers did—you should deliver it with the right amount of context. It’s not Rodgers’s fault that there are lunatics out there who send death threats because of stuff like this, but Rodgers should have known (and might have known) that’s what was going to happen, and he didn’t need to tee them up. You have to be careful if you’re going to make Epstein jokes, and Rodgers was not careful.
Also, it was fair to make fun of Rodgers’s stance on the Covid vaccines back in 2021, not because it’s a bad thing to be skeptical of others’ certainty, but because Rodgers was himself so baselessly certain that the vaccines were bad. There’s a difference between saying you’re uneasy about something and treating it as evil incarnate. We’ve made fun of Rodgers plenty in this space for his various kooky stances. He is an easy guy to make fun of, and there is funny material there for jokes.
Where it gets strange, watching clips back, is when Kimmel decided to go after Rodgers last winter. It plays into the Hollywood trope that these guys try to craft audiences who agree with them on everything and share their affinity for looking down at people. We got it the first time around, Jimmy. You don’t like Aaron Rodgers. Why make fun of the Epstein stuff and the UFO stuff? You’re into UFO talk yourself! It felt personal. Then, obviously, Rodgers took it overboard himself, clumsily or intentionally.
Thankfully, Kimmel’s past feud with Ted Cruz has given us a blueprint on how to achieve lasting peace between the long-tenured late-night man and the Hall of Fame quarterback. Except instead of playing basketball (I don’t think it would be in Kimmel’s best interests to play basketball against an athlete of Rodgers’s caliber), they should do a telethon to see who can raise more money for organizations working to free kids from sex trafficking. Make a bunch of Ashton Kutcher–Danny Masterson jokes. Demonstrate that you both now know how to talk to society about Karl Malone.
Oh No the Sens
The Sens play again tonight. And the Bulls won last night. Both of those things are bad. For the Sens and for the Bulls. (But man do I like seeing Coby White smile.)
Game of the NITe? We’re going Michigan at Maryland, not because either team has a great NIT case (Maryland is in much worse shape than people realize, and Michigan might not win ten games), but because the Dug McDaniel road–games–only suspension is too silly and too Juwan Howard’s Michigan™ to not have our attention. My personal favorite theory is that he committed a white-collar crime and can’t cross state lines for fear of arrest.
#HireTommy