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Health & Fitness

First Round NCAA Basketball Losers Should Play NIT Teams

The University of Minnesota men’s basketball team is playing a quarterfinal game in the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) tonight.  Here’s a suggestion to make both the NIT and NCAA tournaments better.

The NIT tournament should begin with its 32 teams playing the losers of the first round games in the NCAA tournament.  These games could be played on Saturday and Sunday at the same sites as the NCAA round 1 games.  That way every NCAA tournament team would be guaranteed at least two games.  Plus, it would give the NIT teams a chance to beat an NCAA tournament team.  That would be sweet revenge for not being selected to the NCAA tournament in the first place.

Financially, it would make sense because the networks are already all set up at NCAA 1st round sites.  Only half as many NCAA games are played on Saturday and Sunday as were played on Thursday and Friday.  So the NIT round one games would easily fit into the schedule.  Also, the NIT could potentially have some of the very top teams in the country play in their tournament.  For example, this year Duke lost its first round game.  Under this plan, Duke could redeem itself by winning the NIT tournament.

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The only difficulty is that it puts the NIT tournament behind schedule as compared to the NCAA.  The NCAA title game should remain the last game of the year.  A fix for this would be to have the NIT host its “elite eight” instead of its “final four” at Madison Square Garden on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before the NCAA championship game.   College kids can play three games in three days.   It would be fun for them to have more players and coaches around from other teams.  It would also help attendance if there were students and fans from 8 different teams in NYC rather than just four.

What do you think?  Good idea, bad idea?  Needs a few tweaks?  Let me know.

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