National Invitation Tournament
The National Invitation Tournament ( NIT ) is an American invitation tournament in college basketball that has been held by the NCAA since 2005 . However, the tournament was first organized in 1938, a year before the NCAA championship tournament was founded . A second tournament mode has existed since 1985, which, unlike the original tournament, is not played after the college basketball season but before it. This so-called NIT Season Tip-Off takes place every year in November. The older of the two formats is traditionally held in New York's Madison Square Garden and in March. Only the latter is generally referred to as the National Invitation Tournament and is provided with the common abbreviation "NIT". Both variants were organized by the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association (MIBA) prior to being taken over by the NCAA .
history
The NIT was organized by sports journalists from the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association for the first two years of the event . From 1940 five colleges from New York joined forces for this task: Fordham University , Manhattan College , New York University , St. John's University and Wagner College . Since 1948, this group has been officially known as the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association .
In the early years of the NIT, all games in the tournament were played exclusively in Madison Square Garden. This was one of the reasons for the great popularity of the NIT, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, as the media coverage in New York was very attractive to all teams. The first rounds of the NIT have only been held at the local locations of the participating universities since 1977. Only the semi-finals and the final have taken place at Madison Square Garden since then. The change in the mode of competition was due not least to the fact that the number of participants had risen sharply until then. In 1938 only six teams played the tournament among themselves, in 1949 there were twelve, in 1979 there were 24. The record number of participants in 2002 was 40 teams. Since 2007 the field is limited to 32.
Takeover by the NCAA
In 2005, the MIBA sold the historic tournament at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for a total price of 56.5 million US dollars . From that sum, $ 16 million went towards ending the previous legal battle between MIBA and NCAA. As early as 2001, the NIT organizers sued the NCAA competition league on charges of distorting competition. According to plaintiffs, the NCAA took active measures to reduce the success of the NIT's events. At the center of the allegations was the so-called "commitment to participate" rule, according to which the team selected to participate in the NCAA tournament must also take part in this tournament instead of the NIT. With the jointly agreed sale, the legal dispute was settled.
Sporting importance
Due to the great success of the NCAA tournament , the NIT has lost its importance in US college basketball over the years. Especially since the NCAA rules forbid college teams from participating in other tournaments once they have qualified for the NCAA tournament, the NIT has struggled with the image of a tournament for "losers". On the other hand, the NIT is an attractive alternative for less successful teams precisely because they receive media attention in the absence of the country's top teams. More recently, other tournaments, such as the College Basketball Invitational , which has been held since 2008, have emerged, which are comparable to the NIT in terms of orientation.
NIT tournament winner
The record winners of the postseason NIT are the teams of today's St. John's University with six titles . However, the team resigned their most recent title from 2003 after the university was convicted by the NCAA of illegally paying player Abe Keita in 2006 . St. John then declared all team wins in which Keita was on the floor officially invalid. This included the 2003 NIT final.
The other two years without a tournament winner (1997, 1998) also go back to the removal of titles for formal reasons, which were carried out after the end of the tournament.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ NN: National Invitation Tournament (NIT) ( Memento from June 18, 2010 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ NN: National Invitation Tournament ( Memento from July 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ NN: NIT Postseason History ( Memento from February 7, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ USA Today article on the sale of the NIT to the NCAA , accessed April 30, 2011
- ↑ NERA Economic Consulting: Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association v. National Collegiate Athletic Association and Cedric Dempsey (Damages assessment) ( Memento from March 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ cf. Report in the Arizona Star , accessed April 30, 2011
- ^ ESPN report , accessed April 30, 2011