Running 2022-23 NCAA Basketball Thread

UNT was thrilled to earn a trip to Vegas.

BTW, that Tyler Perry kid is really fun to watch.

 

I remember that 1994 tourney. Siena made the F4 (think they lost to Vandy?) and I had a buddy attending school there. It was a big fucking deal. They sent multiple student buses to NYC. Six years earlier, UConn won the NIT and it was the biggest fucking deal in state history (granted, not saying much). The Huskies got a parade in Hartford. That title is viewed as the springboard to the 1990 run to the Elite Eight, when they were a Christian Laettner buzzer-beater away from the Final Four. With the portal and what not these days, I'm not sure a power conference school can parlay the NIT into something bigger. But it's nice when they don't mail it in and the fans show up.

 

No Oregon fan like yourself but obviously I follow the program. I wonder if one of the problems is the constant turnover; since UO gained the "transfer U" reputation (justified or not) and with grad transfers, the portal, etc., hardly anyone is there for more than a year or two and the players don't grow on the fans like in the old days of Terrell Brandon and Anthony Taylor, or even Pritchard.

That sure happened with the women's team when Sabrina/Hebbard were there for four years. There was more to their popularity than just winning.

 

That was definitely the case for Tech. Won the NIT in '95, ended up with a team in '96 that rose as high at 10th in the AP poll and made the tournament. Beat Green Bay in the first round and lost to that juggernaut Kentucky team in the second. Still, NCAA appearances were not commonplace for the Hokies so it was pretty exciting.

 

Time changes expectations. One of the reasons BC said it fired Al Skinner is that his teams, while making the NCAA tourney on a regular basis, only made the Sweet Sixteen once, and in truth, some of those teams should have gotten past the round of 32, their traditional stopping point. Yesterday, BC gave current coach Earl Grant an extension because 1. The team's 16-17 record was its best since 2016-17 and 2. Its 9-11 ACC record was the team's most conference wins since 2010-2011.

 

They also had one at Alexander Coliseum at Georgia Tech. The Hawks played there a few years until the Omni was built.

 

UCLA turned down the NIT one year when Walt Hazzard was the coach. The SID announced it on a Sunday. Hazzard wasn't there, neither was Pete Dalis, the athletic director. Those of us who showed up at UCLA wanting comments thought this was a fairly decent story, a school with UCLA's heritage snubbing the NIT. They said Hazzard was out of state recruiting. Dalis had been at UCLA forever -- student, grad student, athletic department go-fer, assistant facilities manager, intramural coordinator. He worked his way up to athletic director. He finally showed up to take some questions. Afterward, the SID told me, "He's been here for 25 years and this is the first time anybody wanted to talk to him."

 

Those things don't help, but honestly I think that's 90% of major programs these days. Turnover is huge everywhere.

Once a program hits a certain level of success an NIT berth just doesn't mean anything to the fans. Add in the fact that it's finals week and the students have better things to do.

 

Which one?

 

I occasionally covered Fresno State during the Tark era and I swear some of Fresno's fans preferred the NIT because it meant home games.

 

The best game I ever attended as a college student was a first-round NIT game.

Georgetown Wins Triple-Overtime Thriller over Virginia, 115-111; Advances to NIT Second Round - Georgetown University Athletics

 

Sure sounds like a guy who’s trying to get whacked without cause. Or maybe you could claim they’d have cause after that rant.