Outside looking in (ABC Order):
Bowling Green, California, Florida State, Georgia
State, Northwestern, Oregon State, Penn State, TCU,
Vanderbilt, Wyoming
The NIT - What's this all about? Teams not qualifying for the NCAA tournament
have the opportunity to be invited to one of three
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.
The CBI features 16 teams and the CIT will have 32
teams exclusively from mid-major leagues or
lower. The CIT requires teams to have a .500
record or better while the NIT 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 and CIT 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 to the
pay-to-play nature of these tournaments.
To get a feel for what kind of teams the NIT, CBI and
CIT invite to their tournaments, these were the 2014
participants along with their record and RPI.
The 2014 NIT, CBI and CIT teams: