The National Invitation Tournament (NIT) is an annual men's college basketball tournament operated by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Since 2023, all rounds of the tournament are played at various sites across the country which are selected annually. From its founding in 1938 to 2022, the semifinals and finals were always played at Madison Square Garden (MSG) in New York City. Predating the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament by one year, the NIT was considered the most prestigious post-season showcase for college basketball before its status was superseded in the mid-1950s by the NCAA tournament.[1][2]

A second, much more recent "NIT" tournament is played in November and known as the NIT Season Tip-Off. Formerly the "Preseason NIT" (and still sometimes referred to as such colloquially), it was founded in 1985. Unlike the postseason NIT, its final rounds are played at Madison Square Garden. Both tournaments were operated by the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association (MIBA) until 2005, when they were purchased by the NCAA,[3] and the MIBA disbanded.

Unless otherwise qualified, the terms National Invitation Tournament or NIT refer to the post-season tournament in both common and official use.

History

Founding

The post-season National Invitation Tournament was founded in 1938 by the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association, one year after the NAIA tournament was created by basketball's inventor Dr. James Naismith, and one year before the NCAA tournament. The first NIT was won by the Temple University Owls over the Colorado Buffaloes.

Souvenir program from the inaugural NIT showcasing the "National Championship Trophy" won by Temple in 1938.

Responsibility for the NIT's administration was transferred in 1940 to the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Committee, a body of local New York colleges: Fordham University, Manhattan University, New York University, St. John's University, and Wagner College. This became the Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association (MIBA) in 1948.

Originally the tournament invited a field of six teams, with all games played at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.

The field was expanded to eight teams in 1941, 12 in 1949, 14 in 1965, 16 in 1968, 24 in 1979, 32 in 1980, and 40 from 2002 through 2006. From 2007 to 2019 and since 2022, the tournament reverted to the current 32-team format; 2021 saw the field cut to 16 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where no games were scheduled the year before.[4][5]

Early advantages over the NCAA tournament

In its earliest years, before 1950, the NIT offered some advantages over the NCAA tournament:

  • There was limited national media coverage of college basketball in the 1930s and 1940s, and playing all of its games in New York City provided teams greater media exposure, both with the general public and among high school prospects in its rich recruiting territory. The NCAA also staged its eastern regional final in New York City from 1943 through 1950, as well as its Final Four from 1943 through 1948.
  • Until 1950,[6] the NCAA tournament selection committee invited only one team each from eight national regions, potentially leaving better quality selections and natural rivals out of its field, which would opt for the NIT.[7][8]

Prestige

From its onset and at least into the mid-1950s, the NIT was regarded as the most prestigious showcase for college basketball.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]

John McPhee, the writer for The New Yorker, described the tournament:

Several teams played in both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year, beginning with Colorado and Duquesne in 1940. Colorado won the NIT in 1940 but subsequently finished fourth in the NCAA West Region.[21] In 1944, Utah lost its first game in the NIT but then proceeded to win not only the NCAA tournament, but also the subsequent Red Cross War Charities benefit game in which they defeated NIT champion St. John's at Madison Square Garden. In 1949, some Kentucky players were bribed by gamblers to lose their first round game in the NIT.[22] This same Kentucky team went on to win the NCAA.[23] In 1950, City College of New York won both the NIT and the NCAA tournaments in the same season, coincidentally defeating Bradley University in the championship game of both tournaments, and remains the only school to accomplish that feat because of an NCAA committee change in the early 1950s prohibiting a team from competing in both tournaments.

The champions of the NCAA and NIT tournaments played each other for three seasons during World War II. From 1943 to 1945, the American Red Cross sponsored a postseason charity game between each year's tournament champions to raise money for the war effort.[24] The series was described by Ray Meyer as not just benefit games, but as "really the games for the national championship".[25] The NCAA champion prevailed in all three games.[26]

The Helms Athletic Foundation retrospectively selected the NIT champion as its national champion for 1938 (Temple) and chose the NIT champion over the NCAA champion once, in 1939 (Long Island).[27] More recently, the mathematically based Premo-Porretta Power Poll published in the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia retrospectively ranked teams for each season prior to 1949, the year in which the Associated Press poll was implemented. For the period when the tournaments overlapped between 1939 and 1948, Premo-Porretta ranked the NIT champion ahead of the NCAA champion twice (1939 and 1941) and the NCAA champion ahead of the NIT champion eight times.[28] Between 1939 and 1970, when teams could compete in either tournament, only DePaul (1945),[29] Utah (1947),[30] San Francisco (1949)[31] and Holy Cross (1954)[32] claim or celebrate national championships for their teams based solely on an NIT championship,[33][34][35][36] although Long Island recognizes its selection as the 1939 national champion by Helms Athletic Foundation,[37] which was made retrospectively in 1943.[38][39]

In 1943 the NCAA tournament moved to share Madison Square Garden with the NIT in an effort to increase the credibility of the NCAA Tournament.[25] In 1945, The New York Times indicated that many teams could get bids to enter either tournament, which was not uncommon in that day.[40] Since the mid-1950s, the NCAA tournament has been popularly regarded by most institutions as the pre-eminent postseason tournament, with conference champions and the majority of the top-ranked teams participating in it.[20][25]

Nevertheless, as late as 1970, Coach Al McGuire of Marquette, the 8th-ranked team in the final AP poll of the season, spurned an NCAA at-large invitation because the Warriors were going to be placed in the NCAA Midwest Regional (Fort Worth, Texas) instead of closer to home in the Mideast Regional (Dayton, Ohio).[41] The team played in the NIT instead, which it won. This led the NCAA to decree in 1971 that any school to which it offered a bid must accept it or be prohibited from participating in postseason competition, reducing the pool of teams that could accept an NIT invitation.[2][42]