There are those who say the National Invitation Tournament, that venerable college basketball institution that dates to 1938 – one year before the NCAA Tournament was founded – is on its last legs.
Too much competition in the postseason basketball sector, you see. Too many big schools who aren’t interested, and too much talk about expanding March Madness™ from 68 schools to 76, or 90, or whatever it takes to get that 17th-place Big Ten team or 15th-place SEC squad into the field.
But don’t dare talk about that at UC Irvine, or North Texas, Loyola-Chicago or Chattanooga. On those campuses, the NIT, and the ESPN exposure it creates, matters. And it’s possible that because of the insatiable desire of the power conferences to control and dominate the sport and all of its mechanisms, the NIT could turn out to be the salvation for the mid-major class.
The NIT’s Final Four, once a springtime tradition at Madison Square Garden, will be held this year in Butler’s historic Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, where parts of the movie “Hoosiers” were filmed. UC Irvine (31-6 overall and a No. 1 regional seed) faces North Texas (27-8) Tuesday at 4 p.m. PT in one semifinal, with Loyola-Chicago (25-11) and Chattanooga (27-9) squaring off in the nightcap. The survivors meet Thursday, and the winner will hang a banner.
And no, Anteaters coach Russell Turner doesn’t plan to assemble his team in Hinkle the day before and use a tape measure to remind his players that the rims there are 10 feet high just like at home, as the late Gene Hackman did for his Hickory High players in the movie. Turner’s guys are a little more savvy than that. But he did ponder showing “Hoosiers” on the charter flight to Indianapolis.
“That movie is one that resonated with me, moved me,” Turner said in a phone conversation. “But I don’t know how familiar our guys are with it.
“But I know that none of my guys are going to be intimidated by the venue, so we don’t need to measure the buckets.”
This is a reward, and an opportunity, for a team that finished one game behind UC San Diego in the Big West regular season and fell to the Tritons, 75-61, in the conference tournament championship game in Henderson, Nevada.
And there’s a subplot there. Once the big tournament began, the power conference teams assumed control, with no Cinderella candidates reaching the Sweet 16. Yet UCSD as a No. 12 seed came within a 3-point basket of shocking Michigan, which did get to the Sweet 16 before losing to top-seeded Auburn.
But this was a vintage year for the Big West, which not only sent its champion to the NCAA field but put three teams in the NIT: UCI, Cal State Northridge and UC Riverside. The latter two were first-round casualties to Stanford and Santa Clara, respectively, but the Big West was ranked 12th among the 31 Division I conferences in the kenpom.com metrics. The Anteaters, whose 31 victories are a school record, have already knocked off teams from ninth-ranked Conference USA (Jacksonville State) and the 10th-ranked American Athletic Conference (Alabama-Birmingham). They’ll face another AAC foe in North Texas.
NIL payments, the transfer portal, the consolidation of conferences at the top of the pyramid and the continuing talk of NCAA Tournament expansion – and, of course, all of that TV money – have changed the equation in recent years.
So, too, has this: A while back the NIT changed its qualification rules so a regular-season champion that didn’t win its conference tournament no longer received an automatic NIT bid. That seemed to be a death knell to non-power conferences. But only four power conference programs accepted bids to this year’s 32-team field – SMU, Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech and Stanford – and only Oklahoma State from those four got to the quarterfinals. Eleven other power conference teams were invited but declined, nine of them under .500 in their conferences and two (South Carolina and Providence) with 12-20 overall records.
Meanwhile, 16 teams that missed the NCAAs, mostly from the Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East – and five of them under .500 – will compete beginning Monday in the College Basketball Crown tournament in Las Vegas, a made-for-TV invention of Fox and AEG (which partially owns and manages the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, where the final four, lower case, will be held). Thus USC, which finished 16-17 overall and tied for 13th in the Big Ten at 7-13 but belongs to a conference televised by Fox, can say it played in a postseason event.
So tell me: Would you rather watch a tournament with a bunch of underachieving big conference teams whose players are either eyeing the portal or have entered it? Or would you rather watch one that actually means something to its participants?
Rest assured, this means a lot to UCI. It’s the school’s ninth NIT appearance, the deepest run in this tournament for a Big West team since Fresno State won it in 1983, and the longest run in any postseason tournament for a team from this conference since defending champ UNLV got to the 1991 NCAA semifinals and lost to Duke.
“It feels comparable to an NCAA Tournament appearance at this point, even though they’re very different things,” Turner said. “It feels like there’s energy here and momentum here, because of what our team’s doing. It feels like that to me, but I’m kind of in the middle of it, so it’s hard for me to be the one who makes those claims. Hopefully, that’s what everybody here feels, or a lot of people here feel.”
Turner, whose Irvine teams are 320-186 in his 15 seasons at the school, knows whereof what he speaks with the comparison to the NCAA Tournament. The Anteaters have been there twice, losing to No. 4 seed Louisville by a basket in 2015 and knocking off No. 4 seed Kansas State in the first round in 2019 before losing to Oregon.
“Our program represents a great university, and I think when we succeed, we shine a light on other great things that are going on in this university, and that’s our role,” he said. “I think we do it well. I think that we’ve got guys who fit this community really well and that we’re good ambassadors.”
But as the moneyed interests in college athletics continue to expand their influence – kind of like real life, right? – and the stratification of the NCAA comes closer to reality, there could come a time when the NIT is no longer (as the snarky among us maintain) the method of picking the country’s 69th-best team. Instead, it could be a true championship for mid-majors, or at least those who are shut out of the NCAA Tournament – in part, as in UCI’s case, because the big schools won’t play them in nonconference games, affecting their strength of schedule.
“I don’t think what anybody wants is a mid-major championship,” Turner said when I brought it up. “I think that most people see the NCAA Tournament’s magic as being about the underdogs.
“But I don’t think you’re wrong.”
He noted that there’s never been “a, quote-unquote, level playing field,” but there’s at least been “a set of unifying forces in the NCAA that have been a part of the NCAA Tournament becoming what it is and having its place in our culture. I hope that doesn’t change.”
Sadly, the odds are that it will change at some point. But if that means a venerable, historic tournament continues in a format that creates opportunity for those who otherwise wouldn’t get that national TV exposure – those who would, if some big conference administrators have their way, be shut out altogether – then bring it on.
jalexander@scng.com
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