March 18, 2025 | Read Online

The other Men's College Basketball Tournaments are a disaster

A perfectly good thing appears to have been burned down...for no good reason

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Two quick housekeeping notes:

First, it looks like over a hundred of you have signed up for our free bracket challenge, thanks to our pals at Short Courts. That’s awesome!

Short Courts makes beautiful and authentic framed courts and football fields, and they’ve been so kind as to offer to give one of those courts to our grand champion.

Here are the details:

The Bracket Challenge is open to ALL Extra Points readers, not just premium subscribers. If we’ve got your email, you’re welcome to enter the challenge.
Simply fill out your bracket here. Please limit yourselves to just one bracket.
The winner of the bracket challenge will get their very own Short Court of the team of their choice, along with some additional Extra Points prizes. The second and third place winners will also get free Extra Points Premium subscriptions. Winners will be notified the day after the championship game.
No purchase necessary, no cash collected. We’re not out here trying to get anybody in trouble with the NCAA.

Second: It appears that my event at Ohio State this Friday is sold out. But if you’d like to watch our discussion on The Price of College Football, there will be a free livestream here. The discussion is on Friday, March 21st, from 5-7 PM ET.

With the housekeeping notes out of the way, I’d like to speak on something near and dear to my heart for a second…the most important thing in the world right now in college sports.

That’s right. The NIT.

Recently, you didn’t need an advanced degree in Brackettology to figure out what kinds of programs would get invitations to the NIT. As the premier men’s basketball postseason event outside the actual NCAA Tournament, the NIT would send out invites to the best 32 teams that would not be participating in March Madness.

Then, the NIT established a surprisingly democratic rule. Every team that won a regular season conference championship, from the Atlantic 10 to the NEC, would be guaranteed at least a ticket to the NIT. This policy created meaningful postseason opportunities for HBCUs, low-majors and for large programs in the power conferences. While there were occasional examples of teams declining invitations, for the most part, the system worked relatively well.

And then it got blown up.

Back in 2023, which doesn’t seem that long ago until you remember that the story was originally broken by The Messenger, news started to trickle out that FOX wanted to create their own postseason basketball event to compete with the NIT. But instead of sharing the bracket with the full unwashed masses, this new event would be limited to the Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East…the major conferences FOX broadcast.

I was very critical of this event when it was announced. Some of that was for more ideological reasons, since undermining the NIT to create a big-brands-only event would limit meaningful competitive opportunities for smaller colleges. But I also hated it for basketball reasons.

The FOX event, now called the College Basketball Crown, would take place at the end of March, after the transfer portal opened, and well after the typical casual college basketball fan had switched attention to baseball, or perhaps the end of the NBA and NHL regular seasons. As Friend of the Newsletter Matt Norlander of CBS pointed out, back in 2023:

Even then, the proposition has challenges. Teams that fail to make the NCAA Tournament sometimes fire their coaches. Under this template, schools from the Big East, Big 12, and Big Ten would be waiting more than two weeks between the end of their conference tournaments and the Vegas-based Fox event. It's unlikely that an athletic director on the verge of making a coaching change would wait two-plus weeks just to send a team to Las Vegas for a few days.

There are also potential complications with players who opt to end their seasons and seek a transfer elsewhere. Failing to make the NCAA Tournament is prone to breeding roster turnover. There is a chance some teams could still turn down this opportunity or, short of that, send thinner rosters and/or smaller coaching staffs.

Well, now it’s March 2025. And wouldn’t you know it, but that’s exactly what happened with the College Basketball Crown. And it screwed up the NIT too.