As the NCAA college basketball season came to a close, the University of Florida cut down the nets and officially crowned itself the 2024-2025 National Champions by steamrolling the competition within the NCAA Tournament. They were not; however, the only team to bring home a trophy this off-season. With over three hundred teams in NCAA Division I, only one in sixty-eight teams made the cut for the big dance, leaving many teams feeling snubbed and misrepresented with the small percentage included. To combat this controversy, third-party corporations created outside tournaments with the same format and stakes as the NCAA in order to boost television sales and create a crowd-catching and challenging environment for these teams. From the NIT to the newly-founded College Basketball Crown, third-party tournaments are taking over downtime in March and becoming staples within the college basketball postseason.
The National Invitation Tournament (NIT) was actually started before the NCAA Tournament in 1938, letting college programs fight it out for a true National Title, as stated on NCAA.com. In the NIT’s early years, it took precedence over the NCAA, but slowly fell out of the spotlight as the NCAA Tournament grew and grew. Similar to the NCAA, the NIT contains automatic qualifiers from each of the top-twelve ranked conferences, and these teams are granted host rights for the first round. The entire thirty-two-team field is decided on by a “KNIT Score”, which is a combination of offensive and defensive statistics along with strength of schedule and quality of wins to create the best field possible with the teams left available after the NCAA Tournament bids, per NCAA.
Someone would think a basketball program would be honored to be selected for the NIT after not being selected for the NCAA Tournament, right? Not so much anymore, as more and more teams are declining invites due to the lack of incentive and risk of injury, as players are looking forward to professional careers or possibly entering the transfer portal to compete for different schools, leading to schools like University of Chattanooga taking home one of college basketball’s greatest honors.
Something had to be done to prevent these teams from declining their bids, thus, a group of private corporations came together to create a new, modern tournament, the College Basketball Crown. The inaugural tournament took place in Las Vegas and brought more excitement and stakes than the NIT. Airing on Fox, the Crown tournament field was announced with six automatic bids from top-ranked conferences, and also used the “KNIT” rankings to create a field. Sounds similar, right? Like the National Basketball Association (NBA), programs would be paid $300,000 if they brought home the title, with $100,000 going to second place and $50,000 each for the other two final four teams. The Nebraska Cornhuskers battled their way through the field, taking home the six-figure prize, becoming the first team to hold the College Basketball Crown.
With the greater budget and media rights, this new tournament (the Crown) has already cut into the NIT’s side as multiple programs declined NIT bids in order to have a run at the Crown, thanks to Fox’s media contracts within the Big Ten, Big East, and the Big Twelve, per Fox Sports. With the growth of NIL and money within college sports, teams expect more out of tournaments and games in order to guarantee more money in the checkbook. The cash being thrown in athletes’ faces has created a landscape where people feel entitled to being paid before hitting professional status. The NIT and all of its former greatness is dying out, and the College Basketball Crown is the first to dethrone its glory.
