Wow.
That went a lot differently from what we expected.
Not the bracket, really. Once the Upper Bubble was taken care of, Joe’s Bracketology almost nailed who was in and out. Seedings were another story, but even ESPN and/or the NCAA couldn’t figure those out.
What went differently?
Well, here’s our official statement:
We hate to be in this situation. It’s disappointing for the NIT, it’s a bad look for North Carolina, it’s stealing the headlines from 32 other basketball teams. But I think we’re in a good place. For one thing, we don’t have to watch UNC mail it in like they’ve been doing in smaller games for weeks now. For another, nobody else declined. Every other program held the line. There’s some scuttlebutt about Dayton declining, but the further scuttlebutt there is that they weren’t invited (and therefore only declined the CBI). Texas Tech declined, but that was an understandable circumstance. UNC? They’re on an island here, publicly stating that they’re too good for the NIT when on the court, this season, they were quite clearly exactly good enough for the NIT. Michigan didn’t do that. Villanova didn’t do that.
Enough about UNC, though. Let’s talk NIT.
We’ve got our 2023 NIT Bracket Challenge live and ready for your brackets. Submissions will close on Tuesday night, when games begin.
As for the tournament itself, we’ll have previews up the next two days, along with my picks, Joe’s picks, and—of course—Fargo’s picks. Stay tuned for those in the morning and on Tuesday. We’ll be posting the rest of the NIT welcome videos at some point either overnight or tomorrow. We’ll also be getting back into the swing of our other content soon as well—the notes and the nonsense—so if you’re one of our Joe Kelly or college football or dairy fans, thank you for bearing with us. We’ll be back. We just have to make this annual pilgrimage in which we prostrate ourselves and our souls at the altar of the NIT. We’ll be back into full swing soon.
Thank you for all your interest in the NIT before it’s even begun, and to those of you who supported the war against UNC on Twitter, thank you to you as well. We will continue it tomorrow, and we plan to take it to Instagram and TikTok. Then? Who knows, good friend. Who knows. What we do know is that UNC will not get away with this. Not without a severe scolding. Anyway, the NIT interest: Today we received more site traffic than we ever have in a single day. We received almost as much traffic as we did in the entirety of the year 2020, and 2020 was a good year for our site. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are overwhelmed with gratitude.
We have a glorious three weeks ahead, weeks that will take us everywhere from New York City to Las Vegas to, quite possibly, the very mouth of the lion, over in Houston. The NIT is not going anywhere. The NIT is not backing down. The NIT is rising. And dammit. We’re all gonna rise right with it.
God bless you all.
God bless the NIT.
Bona NIT.
