Well, well, well. If it isn’t hordes of NIT fans coming to The Barking Crow to join us in our late-winter revelry.
Just like I always expected.
For those of you new here, here’s what you need to know about the NIT:
1. It Rocks.
The NIT, to borrow a phrase written in my fourth-grade yearbook in pink gel pen, rocks my socks. And they aren’t easy socks to rock, folks.
With other postseason college basketball tournaments, you get the same teams playing over and over again. With other postseason college basketball tournaments, you get directly told by your boss that you still need to work while they’re going on. With other postseason college basketball tournaments, you are exposed—repeatedly, without warning—to the mind of Seth Davis.
The NIT will bring you none of these maladies.
With the NIT, you don’t get neutral, half-filled arenas. You get riotous, entirely full or one-eighth-full (it’s never in between) home courts. With the NIT, you don’t get arguments over whether Gonzaga’s playing in too soft a conference. You get arguments over whether a mediocre team from the Big Ten was disrespected by multiple selection committees because they were seeded behind BYU. With the NIT, you don’t get Tacko Fall anymore. But the NIT did have Tacko Fall first.
We each have our own NIT journey. Mine begins with Tacko Fall. The year was 2017, I was living in Minneapolis, I came home from a happy hour and realized in a panic that 1) I had started an NIT pool a week earlier with five entrants [including myself] and 2) that NIT pool was potentially going to be decided that night, in the second round [the NIT is an unpredictable, wild beast of a tournament, untamed by the prognostications of weathermen and those people with the maps on election night]. Illinois State was playing UCF.
I’ll spare you the details of that game (ok, since you asked, there was a scoreboard malfunction, Tacko Fall was playing, a UCF starter had transferred over from Illinois State, and there were two fouls away from the hoop in the closing five seconds, with neither of those two fouls intentional), but the bottom line is that it got me hooked. There were other shenanigans that year—Indiana refused a home game so the crowd wouldn’t institute mob justice on Tom Crean, Dan Muller tweeted out bitmojis daring power conference schools to schedule his Redbirds, the committee made Syracuse play UNC-Greensboro in the first round right after Jim Boeheim said Greensboro was where the devil goes to take his shits, Cal State-Bakersfield somehow made the Final Four, Jamie Dixon won it back when Jamie Dixon was the guy who’d often been in the Big East mix at Pitt and not the guy who’s often in the NIT mix at TCU, Josh Pastner broke onto the scene for the first time, I flew on an airplane, so on, so forth, it was great. It was a great, great NIT. To be honest, I kind of thought the NIT would always be like that. Got a little hoodwinked by God on that one. But hey, here we are. Blogging about the NIT. Quit our job four years ago to blog about the NIT. Staring at the depths of our late twenties trying to make a living writing a blog about the NIT. Here we are.
As you can imagine, as a 22-year-old straight white man with no tattoos working an easy, white-collar job (as 22-year-old straight white men with no tattoos are wont to do), I saw the content and I couldn’t let it go to waste. When a friend (Derek, for those of you not new here) texted me the words, “One Shining MomeNIT,” it was on. My life was changed. I was, within days, an NIT blogger, and an NIT blogger I have been ever since.
2. The NIT Is the Best Postseason Men’s College Basketball Tournament
Three reasons for this:
First, history. The NIT is the original. The OG. The OT. The ONIT. It preceded the NCA* *********t and was long the preferred tournament, until the NCAA got a little salty post-1970 and told teams they couldn’t play in the NIT if they turned down an invitation to the NCAA’s pet tourney (if you’d like to learn more about this tournament, and how the NCAA probably killed Al McGuire [allegedly] for his act of bravery, here’s a podcast I was blessed with the opportunity to record after consuming enough eggnog to kill a lactose-intolerant middle-aged woman [not literally kill, but you’d hear about it if you were in the same Starbucks line the next day and references to death would be involved]). This, of course, is why our little insurgency exists. We’re trying to bring back the NIT. Restore the proper world order. And we haven’t invaded a single independent democracy to do it.
Second, selectivity. The NIT is harder to make than its much-hyped bastard half-sibling. This is simple math. A 32-team tournament is harder to make than a 68-team tournament, and a tournament with roughly 22 at-large bids is harder to make than a tournament with roughly 46 at-large bids, and a tournament where the automatic bids go to teams who won their regular season championships rather than ones who got hot at the right time and won three piddly games is more selective than one that’s really just a prank run by large corporations to bait ignorant Texas fans into unfairly running Shaka Smart out of town (thing 2a to know is that Shaka Smart was nice to us one time and mean to us zero times).
Third, nuance. Not only is the NIT harder to make than that other tournament down the channel list, but making it isn’t as simple as just beating all of your opponents. You have to beat the right ones, lose to the right ones, and do it the right way. The NIT, like Herb Brooks in the documentary Miracle, isn’t looking for the best guys. It’s looking for the right guys. Similarly, arena football kickers were always better than ones in the NFL, because they had to fit the ball into that little box while NFL kickers have literally the entire sky to put the ball in (if you wonder why arena football’s on the decline, look no further than the NCAA, or so one would suggest were one in the suggesting mood).
3. I Have Never Intentionally Lit, and Would Never Intentionally Light, a Car on Fire
Just gonna put this here.
4. Yes, There’s an NIT Bracket Challenge
There are multiple, of course, but we run a big one here at The Barking Crow. If you’d like a reminder to join it, please give us your email in this form. We won’t use your email for anything other than works of good.
5. Virginia Tech Is the Current Favorite
Everyone’s talking about it, but in case you’ve missed it because you were spending the weekend focused on all those teams losing who have no chance of making the NIT (there is no greater indicator of the failure of the American media than the fact we heard even a peep about Kentucky/Arkansas on Saturday, especially considering Eric Musselman didn’t get even close to naked after the game), Virginia Tech’s the favorite. It was St. Bonaventure. Then it was San Francisco. Now, it’s the Hokies. And yes, that’s the same Storm Murphy playing for them who was Fletcher Magee’s sidekick back at Wofford. Followed Mike Young up the Piedmont. You thought there could be two guys named Storm Murphy? Do you also think Bobby Hurley is just one person and not the basis for The Prestige, Harry Potter, and Jon & Kate Plus 8?
6. We Have NIT Bracketology
Our very own Joe Stunardi (no relation to Joe Lunardi unless it counts as related if you have a shrine to him in your closet next to your respective Ken Pomeroy and Nate Silver and Joel Lanning shrines) keeps the NIT Bracketology fresh, and the rumor is that tomorrow’s update, with it being the beginning of March and closer to the beginning of conference tournament games featuring teams who could make the NIT (sorry, Fairleigh Dickinson and Central Connecticut State) will come with a much-improved model, making it even more accurate than usual (it’s still probably going to miss one or two teams, man must not know all the ways of the Lord).
7. We Have Other NIT Coverage
I guess this is implied by our existence as an NIT blog, but we have plenty of NIT coverage available, and we won’t stop until either we crown an NIT champion, the NIT gets canceled again, or the city of Austin gets nuked (the one in Texas, sorry Spam-fam). Yes, nothing shy of nuclear war can stop this NIT. I’m sure I won’t regret saying that.
