Reminder:
Regular season champions that do not win their
conference tournament get an automatic bid to the
NIT. This season, Akron, Belmont, Bucknell, High
Point, Hofstra, IPFW, Monmouth, New Mexico State,
North Florida, San Diego State, St. Mary's (CA),
Texas Southern, UAB, Valparaiso and Wagner have
automatic bids to the NIT.
The NIT - What's this all about? Teams not qualifying for the NCAA tournament
have the opportunity to be invited to one of four
other postseason tournaments:
The NIT
features a 32-team field chosen right after the NCAA
chooses the 68 teams in its tournament. It
awards automatic bids to regular season conference
champions who do not otherwise go to the NCAA
tournament. Also, the first 4 teams out of the NCAA
tournament become automatic 1 seeds in the NIT.
The
new tournament this season is the Vegas
16, a 5-day postseason tournament
featuring 16 teams playing all games in
Las Vegas in the week leading up to the
Final Four. However, the 2016 edition will
only feature 8 teams in a 3-day
tournament.
The CBI features 16 teams and the CIT will have 32
teams exclusively from mid-major leagues or lower
(only 26 teams in 2016). The CIT requires teams
to have a .500 record or better while the NIT, Vegas
16 and CBI do not have such
a requirement. The CIT also doesn't place teams in
a bracket, opting to place teams in matchups after the
previous round has concluded.
Schools have been known to decline an invitation to the
CBI/CIT/Vegas 16 tournaments due to the lack of interest
in playing in a third-tier tournament (e.g., "We're
Indiana. We don't play in the CBI.") or the pay-to-play
nature of these tournaments.
To get a feel for what kind of teams are involved, these
were the 2016 participants along with their record and
RPI.
