This is fun. The NIT’s happening, guys!
NIT Bracketology’s updated. Here’s today’s NITuation:
Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song): Wichita State, Richmond, Stanford
It was a busy day in the A-10. St. Bonaventure fell to Dayton to keep their faintly faint hopes alive. SLU whooped UMass to climb up the ranks of NIT favorites. And Richmond got beat by Saint Joe’s.
We love Saint Joe’s. The hawk! It’s always flapping! But they are bad this year. And the game was at home. And the result was that our model took Richmond from being the second overall seed to being…out of the field entirely. Yikes.
As far as Wichita State and Stanford go…
The NIT field is really tight right now. It’s the hardest postseason tournament to make (unless you’re trying to make the MAAC Tournament and you play in the Big Sky, but to my knowledge that situation isn’t happening). This is why.
Right now, our model has the median eventual seedings for twenty teams between 55th and 66th. It expects the NIT field to start at 49th. That’s tight. That’s really tight. Some of those may end up being automatic bids—UC-Santa Barbara’s the Big West favorite, SLU and Utah State have a chance, Toledo’s the favorite in the MAC, Winthrop’s the big favorite in the Big South—but even so, that’s tight bunching. And when tight bunching’s happening, little things change the picture. Teams move out and in without playing because our model sees things like, as an example case, Team C losing and falling past Team A in SOR but not Team B, and our model sees Team B getting the benefit from that and Team A getting hurt, and it adjusts its simulations accordingly. This can happen in a game from last night. It can happen in a conference tournament game. There are ripples, and while the other tournament washes out these ripples with its gluttonous breadth, the NIT is a lean, mean, sixteen-team machine.
So that’s how Wichita State can slide up past Drake and Stanford can slide down past Louisiana Tech despite none of those four teams playing.
Moving In: Drake, Louisiana Tech, Penn State
Drake holds the thieved seat now, meaning they’re the last team in the other tournament and our model expects there to be one bid thief, so they get the boot. Louisiana Tech is ever-so-narrowly in the projection, but everyone who’s in is ever-so-narrowly in (except for maybe Indiana who is just trotting down NIT main street like it owns the place—and it well might own the place).
And then there’s Penn State.
As we’ve said before (a lot), our model doesn’t account for optics. I mean, cripes, it’s modeling the NIT. Optics left the station a long time ago. But anyway, it doesn’t account for the fact that Penn State is projected to finish the year five games under .500, which means something but a something that could be multiplied by optics. With the NIT, we just don’t know how the committee would treat something like this. Penn State played a brutal schedule. Their underlying numbers are good. They have only one bad loss (to Nebraska at home), and they have a slew of good wins (they’ve beaten Wisconsin, Maryland, Rutgers, Virginia Tech, and VCU). The committee might be swayed. The committee might not be swayed. There aren’t many comparable historic cases, so it’s hard to know, so we decided not to fiddle and make a one-off exception in our model for a trend that may or may not exist. Anyway, they might be out tomorrow, because Stanford and North Texas and Richmond and Mississippi and Marshall are all breathing down their neck.
Teams Too Likely to Win Their Conference Tournament
With the adjusted field lacking automatic bids, Joe updated our model such that teams who are more than 50% likely to win their conference tournament are held out of our NIT Bracketology. Right now, this applies only to Winthrop, who would slot in between Minnesota and Duke.
Should bubbly NIT teams pull for Winthrop to win? They can, but they don’t have to. If Winthrop loses, they’re probably dropping at least five spots, which would take them out of the field. Realistically, they’re dropping more. Longwood and Radford are worse than Saint Joe’s.
Next in Line
Below the field, from closest to close:
Stanford
North Texas
Richmond
Mississippi
Marshall
Navy
Kentucky
St. John’s
Providence
Belmont
Georgia
Dayton
Next out of Line
Above the field, from closest to close:
Wichita State
SMU
Colgate*
Georgia Tech
Xavier
North Carolina
Colorado State
Virginia Tech
Boise State
UConn
Rutgers
Loyola**
VCU
St. Bonaventure
*Colgate is more than 50% likely to win Patriot League Tournament, so you should probably just hope for them to take care of business there.
**Loyola is more than 50% likely to win Arch Madness, but probably needs to lose to someone worse than Drake, but don’t pull for Drake to beat Loyola—pull for Drake to lose to someone awful so they fall past the NIT, unless you’re a Drake fan, in which case just hope to lose to Loyola badly or in a close one to someone kinda bad.
***
And that’s the NITuation.
Today’s other notes:
- Syracuse climbed on the back of that win over UNC. Much safer now. But approaching a lack of safety in the other direction. We will say this a few hundred times these next dozen days: It’s hard to make the NIT. Meanwhile, UNC is back within striking distance.
- Oregon exited the NITuation by failing to lose to Arizona at home.
- Rutgers entered the NITuation with a blowout loss to Nebraska (something that should also help Penn State in our model’s eyes, for better or worse).
- Duke visits Georgia Tech tonight. It’s hard to know exactly what the Blue Devils need to do. On the one hand, that would be a nice road victory, keeping the dogs off Duke’s heels. On the other, beating Georgia Tech might provoke a Georgia Tech-for-Duke trade with the other tournament. Given that the pack seems to be slightly off-center in the low direction, I’d say Duke wants to narrowly win, but I could be wrong. Either way, try to keep it close, Mike.
- Indiana visits Michigan State in a massive one. The biggest game between Indiana and Michigan State in history, I would offer, and I mean that sincerely as the biggest NIT fan the world has ever known. What does each want to happen? No idea. Not a clue. And I mean that sincerely as well, again as the biggest NIT fan the world has ever known.
- Kentucky, who’s in the same boat as Penn State with the sub-.500 thing, visits Mississippi, who’s been a key NIT player at points recently but has fallen on hard days.
- Xavier goes to Georgetown. That’d be a nice one for Xavier to lose. Road loss. Georgetown’s bad but not egregiously so. Should pull the Musketeers into our reach.
- Memphis visits USF. No sudden movements. Toledo visits Central Michigan. Even fewer sudden movements. Negative sudden movements, even, if they can find a way to accomplish that.
- Boise State hosts Fresno State. Is this what they’ve been building towards?
Good luck out there.
