Question: How are teams selected for the NIT basketball tournament?

The National Invitational Tournament Trophy.

Evergreen’s Clint Hyde asked me an interesting sports-related question earlier this week. He’d seen on ESPN.com that Alabama, Indiana, TCU and UNC-Greensboro were the top four seeds in the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) by virtue of being the first four teams left out of the NCAA Tournament. His question was: How does one know that these were the first four teams left out of the NCAA tournament.

This was something I’d never heard before, and I presumed that the organizers of the NCAA Tournament and NIT work closely together on Selection Sunday. To me it makes sense that the NCAA tourney folks would provide the NIT organizers with the rankings of their selection committee to let the NIT organizers know which teams are off the table. It would also allow the NIT organizers to reach out to those non-NCAA tourney teams immediately with invitations to their tourney.

A ranked list also benefits the NIT tourney because, for the good of the sport, they have a good idea of who to invite in order to make their tournament as competitive (and profitable) as possible and not an afterthought. Both tournaments benefit from the promotion of their sport, and I suspect that ranking the teams also helps the feelings of some teams that don’t make the big tournament.

When I took a closer look at this, I learned that like the big NCAA Tournament, the NIT is also administered by the NCAA. Only 32 teams are invited to the NIT and at one time ESPN (which televises the tourney) had a big hand in the selection process. Officially, a committee of former college coaches select the teams from the NIT. I suspect that to aid in their decisions they’re supplied with the NCAA selection committee rankings.

The big NCAA tournament features 68 teams. Thirty-two of those teams receive automatic bids by winning their conference championships. The other 36 teams receive at-large berths in the tourney, and they are selected for the tournament by the NCAA selection committee.

I was interested to learn that the current NCAA selection committee for the men’s basketball tourney only has 10 members. Eight of them are athletic directors and two of them are conference commissioners. This is a pretty small group, and they work for such universities as Stanford, Kentucky, BYU, Northwestern and Duke.

I consider myself a casual college basketball fan, but I like filling out an NCAA tournament bracket as much as the next fellow. Also, just like the next fellow, my bracket is usually busted after the first round or two. Just for fun, like millions of other people, I filled out a bracket on Monday with predictable results.

The only SEC teams I have getting to the Sweet 16 are LSU, Tennessee and Kentucky. I’ve got Duke winning the East bracket and Gonzaga wining the West. I look for Virginia to win the South bracket and for North Carolina to win the Midwest.

I predict that Duke and Virginia will meet in the National Championship Game on April 8 with Duke winning it all. With that said, I’ve never been a huge Duke fan, and my prediction of their winning the “Big Dance” will likely prove to be the kiss of death. In the end, only time will tell, but we’ve got a lot of good basketball to watch ahead of us.