Because this college basketball tournament once was bigger than March Madness. After the game, the Buckeyes sat in the locker room, dejected that they likely had come up short in their bid for one of the eight spots in the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament. At the time it was the only postseason option for Big Ten teams, and tournament organizers selected only one team per district.
It was Madison Square Garden. It was the mecca of college basketball. Today that decision would seem like lunacy. The schools took home thousands of dollars as their share of the gate receipts for playing in Madison Square Garden. In the NCAA eliminations, they were lucky to make expenses. The NIT also is the senior competition, organized in as a six-team affair by entrepreneurial New York City sportswriters.
That first year the Temple University Owls won all three of their games, prevailing in the final over the University of Colorado Buffaloes They had seen how successful a college basketball tournament could be and wanted a piece of the action.
By the time DePaul ascended as a regional power, the NIT fielded eight teams it currently has a team format. Kentucky's early national titles in the late 's and early 's were not national titles at all. The NIT field was slowly expanded and during the 's, it was a hot ticket with many compelling games. This allowed some schools the opportunity to compete in both tournaments, with City College of New York being the first and only school to win both titles in the same year in Kentucky won three NCAA titles , and and one NIT title during the time period that both tournaments were considered prestigious.
In addition, the NCAA began to expand their field, first to 16 teams from 8 and then to 22 teams. This further put a crimp on the NIT. A point shaving scandal was exposed in the early 's, which implicated many major programs in New York City and around the country including Kentucky , which was a huge blow to the college basketball scene in New York, including the NIT which was so closely associated with Madison Square Garden, the setting for many of the fixes.
In , Kentucky was considered the premier basketball team in the country. By the year , even Kentucky Wildcats had included a black player in their team. Playing in the NIT meant that college teams would get more media attention. However, its decline started when the NCAA started including more teams and getting more television coverage. And so by the mids, the NIT had become a secondary tournament for lesser teams. Nowadays, the National Invitation Tournament is only considered as a consolation tournament for those teams who fail to make it to the NCAA Tournament.
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