Republishing this from 2018, as a welcome message to those discovering this blog for the first time, possibly because I just chirped at you after you used the #NIT hashtag (it’s that time of year again – sorry if I was unfair). I’ve lightly edited from the original text*. Three years! Wow.
Why the NIT is the Best
NIT Stu – February 27th, 2018 – allthingsnit.wordpress.com (pour one out for the old days)
I get asked a lot of questions.
More accurately, I get asked one question a lot.
That question? “Stu, why do you like the NIT so much?”
I’ve answered it in bits and pieces over the years (Editor’s note: months), but what it comes back to is this: The NIT is the greatest tournament in existence. Plain and simple, it’s the best.
Sure, sure, you Europeans reading this will say, “Oy, but what about the World Cup, mate?”Well, Europe, the World Cup is just an exclusionary Olympics. There. I said it. Not all countries get invited, and they only play one sport. Booooooooooring.
A more common response I get here in the States is an eye-roll accompanied by, “Yeah, but what about the **** T*********, dude?” (Editor’s note: NIT Stu has managed to only say the words “NCAA Tournament” together one time since we started this blog, partially by censoring it when quoting someone else saying it) To that, I offer the following three reasons (not an exhaustive list, but convenient for organizing an argument) why the NIT is superior.
1. The NIT is more selective than that other basketball tournament that happens in March.
Only 32 teams are invited to the NIT each year. Well, unless one of them does what Georgetown did that one year and declines an invitation, in which case 33 might get invited. Still, 32 is a much more fashionable number of teams for a basketball tournament than a gluttonous 68. If the NCAA is going to let everybody in, they might as well start calling it the 2009 Big East Tournament.
2. The NIT is more historic than that basketball tournament that nobody should care about.
The greatest indicator that our American education system is failing is that it’s producing adults, with high school and often college degrees, who don’t know that the NIT was long preferred over its younger step-brother. They don’t even know how programs kept choosing the NIT over its pathetic rival until the NCAA decreed in 1971 that schools which declined invites to the NCAA’s poor excuse for a tournament would be prohibited from playing in the NIT. One can only hope that what these newfangled “charter” schools are charting is the rise, fall, and eventual rise of the NIT. Otherwise, we’re on the brink of producing another intellectually impotent generation.
3. It’s harder to make the NIT than it is to make that bastard of a tournament that gets way more attention than it deserves.
If a basketball team is good, and it’s good enough to be above a certain level of good, it goes to that disgusting event that dirties the word “tournament.” To make the NIT, teams have to fit inside multiple boundaries: they can neither be too bad nor too good.
When explaining this, I often use the analogy of kicking an Outdoor Football Field Goal vs. kicking an Arena Football Field Goal. In Outdoor Football, the goalposts have no height limit, so it’s impossible for a kicker to miss high. In Arena Football, the goalposts are a rectangle, suspended in mid-air (sounds pretty sweet, right?), and kickers have to kick the ball above the bottom pipe but below the upper one. This is why you’ve never heard of a hall-of-fame caliber Arena Football kicker: it’s simply too hard. “Great” “kickers” like Adam Vinatieri can make a career off of getting away with missing high, but that shit doesn’t fly in the AFL.
Similarly, teams that can’t manage to stay below the cut line don’t get to play in the NIT.
Additionally, the automatic route to qualification for the NIT is limited to teams who win their conference’s regular season title, unlike that soft ***** *** ***** of a tournament which lets a team in if they win three straight games or so at the right time.
If you didn’t like the NIT before reading this post, that’s ok. It isn’t an indictment of you as a person. It’s an indictment of the American education system and mainstream media. But now that you’re, shall we say, awoken, we look forward to seeing you spread the gospel of the NIT to your friends, family, and closest peers (also Lyft passengers I have really good luck with Lyft passengers).
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*Edits: removed a paragraph, changed a word, tightened my censorship, added a parenthetical
