Every NIT Championship is unique. It is a singular moment in history featuring two chosen teams, and for at least the next few years, even the site involved will be original. This will be the Las Vegas NIT Championship. This will be the Conference USA NIT Championship. This will be the NIT Championship After Dark.
North Texas and UAB will play one another this evening for the fourth time this season. North Texas won the first two engagements. UAB took the third. This will be the eighth time these programs have met during the joint McCasland-Kennedy era. UAB leads the series four games to three.
These programs know one another exceptionally well, and as happens when any competitors meet this often, a rivalry has developed. It’s not necessarily that they don’t like each other—they might not, but we don’t know that for sure. Rather, it’s a rivalry born of knowing each other so well. Every matchup has been hashed out before. Every scouting report has been read through a hundred times. This is not two teams from opposite ends of the country meeting for the first time on the most special stage. This is two very equal competitors playing head-to-head basketball yet again in a half-empty arena time zones away from Birmingham and Denton. It’s one or the another. One ends their season—and for many players and possibly a coach, their time at the school—with a championship. One goes home a loser.
We’re not trying to craft some narrative here that says the NIT is the pinnacle of basketball. We’re not trying to say these are the two best teams in the country (no matter how much I’d like to see North Texas get a crack at Miami). What we’re trying to say is the thing that’s been a theme since a few hours before this tournament’s bracket was unveiled:
Basketball players play basketball.
Basketball programs have pride.
The biggest challenge of the NIT is how much you must want to win.
It’s easy to want to win in that other tournament. It’s easy to win in it if you’re the better team. Play your game, play well, and you’ll probably win. This is the likely story with UConn this weekend over in Houston. In the NIT, it’s more complicated. The best team has a good chance, but if the best team doesn’t want it? If the best team thinks, “We were the 44th-best team in the country, not the 50th!” and takes that as an excuse to not show up? Suddenly, Morehead State is rolling. The ball bounces on.
Again, the NIT isn’t the pinnacle of basketball. But it might be the pinnacle of wanting it. It might be the pinnacle of pride. Because if you’ve watched North Texas these last three weeks, and if you’ve watched UAB, you know something well: These guys aren’t above anything. They’re basketball players. They’re going to play basketball. They’re going to play basketball with pride.
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9:30 PM EDT, ESPN2.
