CSNbbs

New college basketball tourney to compete with NIT
http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/colle...5848.story

November 14, 2007
By Jeff Barker | Sun reporter

Quote:College basketball's postseason landscape is about to get more crowded with the introduction of a new, 16-team men's invitation tournament that will compete with the NIT for teams that don't make the NCAA tournament's 65-team field.

The College Basketball Invitational (CBI) is being announced today. It will be a single-elimination tournament, with all games played at campus sites. The final two teams will play a best-of-three series to determine the champion.

The new tournament raises the question: How much is too much?

Ninety-seven teams currently participate in the postseason. The new tourney would increase that figure to 113.

The CBI is being produced by the Gazelle Group, a Princeton, N.J., sports marketing firm that runs a number of preseason tournaments. Among them is the CBE Classic, which has its semifinals in Kansas City on Monday featuring Maryland, UCLA, Missouri and one more school not yet determined.

"This past season, UConn, LSU, Iowa, Oklahoma, Missouri, California, Washington, Akron and St. Louis, among others, were all left out of postseason play," the firm said today in a news release. "The CBI creates the opportunity for such deserving teams to continue playing and be part of the postseason environment."

Calls to the NIT were referred to Greg Shaheen, the tournament's president. The NIT, which plans a 32-team postseason field, was taken over by the NCAA several years ago.

I like the idea. Even though a bid to this tourney, like the NIT, would be considered a distant second prize, it would be a nice reward for hard work and a chance for our program to become better noticed.

The NIT is nice in the sense that they're on campus for the early games. Where the NIT sucks monkey dong is that their selection process is directly proportional to your ability to make a New York crowd interested. Places like NIU don't have a chance in that environment. If I am correct, back in our old Mid-Con days, Wisconsin-Green Bay rolled through the conference, but got upset for the automatic bid. Then, they not only got snubbed for the NCAA (an injustice, but not totally shocking) but also for the NIT because they didn't have the "It" factor, namely, lots of guys from places like Massapequa and Lindenhurst.

A lower-level tourney based in the midwest might provide a nice payoff to schools like ours following a decent season.