IT’S HERE!!!!!!
After a long day (a couple hours) of typing things about other conferences, we finally get to talk about the thing that is, today, most important to us:
The HoLo.
The HoLo, if you don’t knowLo, is what we in the biz call the Horizon League (which, as we’ve recently noted, is not your father’s HoLo—Valpo and Butler and Loyola are #gone). The HoLo has the longest active NIT automatic bid streak in the country, having accomplished the feat in four straight seasons. Presumably under pressure from the NCAA, they’ve changed the format this year, adding in reseeding and double byes and probably biased refs (just saying) to keep regular season champion Wright State from becoming consecutive automatic bid number five (fun fact: “consecutive automatic bid number five” was nearly the name of “Mambo No. 5” but it didn’t fit well on CD’s).
The end result?
Wright State’s still more likely to make the NIT than miss it, you mud-slurping haters.
The reason?
Well, the HoLo accidentally gave Northern Kentucky a free pass to the semifinals too, and the semi’s and championship are happening next week in notoriously NIT-friendly Indianapolis (you know a city’s good when the most exciting day of its year ends with a milk chug). Northern Kentucky hasn’t beaten Wright State yet this year, but they have the best chance, and it’s always possible that randomly-generated-by-2K big man Loudon Love glitches out in the championship game and puts a free throw in the rafters at the Indiana Farmers Coliseum, and then the ref tells him to go get it, and he does but it takes a minute, and while he’s up there NKU scores a bunch of points and Wright State can’t come back.
We use the phrase “buckle up” a lot around here when the NIT gets close (related: we also like to yell “seatbelts!” whenever we’re on school buses and the bus is about to move, making all those dumb kids look for seatbelts and momentarily panic that they’re gonna get in trouble and/or die in a crash, but we haven’t been on a school bus in years now, possibly because we kept yelling “seatbelts!” and calling attention to our status as stowaways trying to exploit the soft underbelly of the public transit system for free rides to the KFC in front of that apartment complex that’s behind the KFC). In this case, we mean it.
For those wondering, the tournament begins tonight, but we won’t see Wright State play until Monday. We’ve got games tonight at campus sites, and games Thursday at campus sites, and then Monday and Tuesday in Milk City aka Milk Litty aka Indianapolit aka Indianapolis (on the fairgrounds!).
Buckle up.
