There’s a strategy for making the NIT that’s called the ‘Beat-Cal’ strategy. Beat-Cal, or Beat-Cal for short, relies upon the team in question beating a bad Power Five team to make their rap sheet look visibly better to someone who doesn’t realize quite how bad that team (often, in recent years, Cal) is—like, theoretically, the NIT Selection Committee. It’s a move for mid-majors and low-majors more than high-majors, who have enough chances that it’s hard to dress their résumé up as something its not.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work.
Sometimes you lose to Cal.
Enter: our beloved San Francisco Dons.
Yep, them again. The Allie Hamilton of college basketball teams. What do they want? Who are we to say? Because as much as we admire their abandonment of convention, there is no strategy called the ‘Lose-to-Cal’ strategy. So unless Todd Golden’s an innovator, which I guess he is, so I should probably pivot now before I look like a fool—So unless this is another of Todd Golden’s innovations, San Francisco’s in trouble after yesterday’s loss. And we’re concerned, because while we aren’t that handsome, we do picture ourselves as Noah in this analogy. We want to die holding San Francisco’s hand.
Other NIT notes of notable note:
- Richmond finally lost. Took ‘em long enough. But they’re in a solid place, still. Lot of wiggle room for A-10 play. They can read the room a good amount.
- Western Kentucky beat Rhode Island in what would be a straight-up bubble game if it was happening in February and I was on the call, speaking so loudly into the microphone that they couldn’t turn my volume down low enough to be tolerable for viewers, many of whom were quickly changing the channel because I was saying things like, “This is the most important game in these schools’ histories, an NIT berth is on the line, Big Red I love you Big Red come say hi Big Red what’s your favorite thing in the whole wide world, ok, yes, this is only the biggest game since 2018 for WKU but for URInation (I’ve pronounced this without spelling out URI) this is huge.”
- Arizona State almost lost to Grand Canyon. Would’ve been a nice one. Bummerville, population them (they’ve still got a good chance, don’t worry).
- Georgetown/St. John’s was electric. Need these programs to get better. But not that much better. NIT better.
- Today, Maryland hosts Rutgers and Marquette visits Creighton. Maryland and Marquette are both in that boat of needing to win enough to not have an unsightly W-L record but lose enough to hold their résumé underwater. I don’t know what to tell them today. We’re so far out, still.
- Colorado/Northern Colorado’s interesting. First Division I game for the Bears under Steve Smiley. Holy shit his name is Steve Smiley. That’s amazing. But yeah first real game in the post-Jeff Linder era.
- In WCC Pack action (#WCCPacktion, sorry MAC), Pepperdine travels to UNLV and San Diego hosts Nevada. I’ll be the one to say it. Every team in the WCC has an NIT shot this year. Besides Gonzaga. So pay attention to everyone but Gonzaga.
