NIT Tournament Explained: Format, History and Who Gets In

The NIT, the National Invitation Tournament, is the NCAA-owned postseason tournament for Division I men's basketball teams left out of March Madness. It is a single-elimination bracket, 32 teams through 2026, chosen on the evening of Selection Sunday from the teams the NCAA tournament did not take. The early rounds are played on campus in the higher seed's arena, the semifinals and final at a neutral site, and the last games are played while the NCAA tournament is still going on.

It is also older than the event it now serves. The NIT was first played in 1938, one year before the NCAA tournament existed, and for a decade and more it was the invitation a good many teams wanted most. From 2027 the NCAA tournament grows to 76 teams, taking more of the teams that used to fill the NIT's top seed lines.

What the NIT is, and how the NIT and the NCAA tournament differ

Start with what it is not. The NIT does not crown a national champion, has no automatic place for the winner of a conference tournament, and has not been independent of the NCAA for two decades. Since the 2006 event the same association runs both tournaments, which is the single fact that explains most of the NIT's modern shape. A competitor does not get to pick its own field. A subsidiary takes what the parent leaves.

What the parent leaves is still a good bracket. The teams at the top of an NIT field are the ones that sat on the bubble until the last hour of Selection Sunday, and the NCAA committee's first four teams left out have customarily been offered the NIT's top seeds. Below them come major-conference teams with losing league records and respectable computer ratings, and regular-season champions of smaller leagues that lost once in their conference tournament at the wrong time.

	NCAA tournament	NIT
First played	1939	1938
Run by	The NCAA	The NCAA since the 2006 event; New York colleges before that
Field size	68 through 2026, 76 from 2027	32 through 2026; the 2027 size is set in the NCAA's procedures for that year
Guaranteed places	Conference tournament champions	Teams from leading conferences by rating; some regular-season champions
Early-round sites	Neutral arenas	The higher seed's home arena
Final site	A football stadium	An arena: Madison Square Garden through 2022, Indianapolis in 2024 and 2025
What the winner is	National champion	NIT champion

The format is single elimination throughout. Five wins took the title in the 32-team bracket. There are no regions with names and no play-in games; the bracket is simply four quarters that feed two semifinals. Games are played under the NCAA Men's Basketball Rules Book like any other, except in the years when the NIT has been used to try out rule changes, which gets its own section below.

One distinction trips people up every March. A team does not "qualify" for the NIT by finishing in a certain place. Apart from a handful of protected slots, every team in it is there because a committee chose it, exactly as the name says. The main bracket's own mechanics, seeds and regions and the First Four, are covered in our explainer on how the March Madness bracket works.

• 1938Year of the first NIT
• 6Teams in the first field
• 32Teams in the field through 2026
• 5Wins needed for the title in a 32-team field

Field sizes are those in the NCAA's records for the postseason NIT. The 2027 field is set in the NCAA's procedures for that year.

How teams get into the NIT: protected places, then the committee

Nobody applies. On the evening of Selection Sunday, after the NCAA bracket is revealed, a separate NIT committee announces its own field from the Division I teams that are left. In the 2025 event that field of 32 was assembled in three layers.

The first layer was a set of protected places for the leading conferences, decided by computer rating. Two went to the best-rated teams left over from the ACC and two to the best left over from the SEC, the two power leagues not tied to a rival event that year.

The second layer was a conditional automatic bid for regular-season conference champions, described in its own section further down. The third was the at-large pool: the committee filled whatever places remained with the teams it judged best.

1. 1NCAA field announcedThe 68 teams in the NCAA tournament are removed from consideration. Everything that follows is drawn from who is left.
2. 2Protected placesPlaces go to the best remaining teams, by computer rating, from leading conferences, two each from the ACC and SEC in 2025.
3. 3Regular-season championsA conference champion that missed the NCAA field gets an automatic place only if its average ranking across seven rating systems clears a set threshold.
4. 4At-large selectionsThe NIT committee fills the remaining places on merit.
5. 5Seeding and pairingSixteen teams are seeded, four to each quarter of the bracket, and the unseeded teams are sent to them with geography in mind.

The sequence the NCAA used for the 2025 event. Selection rules have been revised almost every year since 2024, and the NCAA's procedures for a given year are the authority.

The NIT alongside a 76-team NCAA tournament

In May 2026 the NCAA announced that its main tournament would grow from 68 teams to 76 for 2027, with 44 at-large places in place of 37. Those seven extra at-large places come straight off the top of the pool the NIT used to draw its best seeds from: the teams that sat just outside the field on Selection Sunday.

The NIT's own field size and selection rules for 2027 are set in the NCAA's published procedures for that year. The two-part logic of recent years, places guaranteed to the leading conferences on the strength of computer ratings and the rest chosen by the selection committee, is the starting point. Any bracket smaller than 32 that is not a power of two needs byes, and in a tournament built on home court those byes would most naturally go to the top seeds.

Treat the fine print with some caution. Which rating is used, how many conferences are protected and who hosts have each changed more than once since 2024, and the NCAA's published procedures for a given March are the only reliable statement of them. What will not change is the order of events: the NCAA tournament picks first.

Campus sites, home court, and a bracket that leans toward the host

The NCAA tournament goes to great lengths to keep teams off their own floors. Its bracketing rules bar a team from playing in an arena where it has played more than three regular-season games. The NIT does the opposite on purpose.

In recent years the first three rounds, meaning the first round, the second round and the quarterfinals, were all played on campus, at the arena of the better-seeded team. A No. 1 seed that kept winning could play three straight home games and reach the semifinals without boarding a plane. Only then did the last four teams travel to a neutral building.

The reasons are practical before they are competitive. An NIT game at a neutral site in the middle of March would draw a few hundred people. The same game in the home team's building, sold to season-ticket holders who thought the year was over, can fill a lower bowl. Campus sites also spare the tournament the cost of renting arenas in cities with no rooting interest.

What hosting does to the results

Home court is worth several points in college basketball, more than in the professional game, and the NIT hands it to the better team in every round before the semifinals. The effect is to stack two advantages on one side. In a neutral-site tournament a No. 13 seed needs to be better than a No. 4 for forty minutes. In the NIT an unseeded team needs to be better than a seeded one in the seeded team's gym, in front of its students, with its rims and its sightlines.

That makes deep runs by teams from the bottom half of the bracket harder to come by than upsets in the main event, which our guide to March Madness upsets by seed counts line by line.

There are two leaks in the system. The first is arena availability. College buildings are booked for concerts, high school state tournaments and commencement rehearsals months ahead, and an athletic department that did not expect to be playing in late March may find its floor taken. When that happens the game moves to the lower seed's arena, and the bracket's logic flips for a night.

The second is motivation, which no seeding formula measures. A major-conference team that spent the winter expecting an NCAA bid can arrive at an NIT first-round game deflated, with players already weighing their options elsewhere. A mid-major champion that lost its conference final by a basket arrives angry. Home court does not always cover that gap.

The regular-season champion question

Thirty-odd Division I conferences send one team each to the NCAA tournament by right, and in nearly all of them that team is the winner of a tournament lasting three to five days. The team that finished first across two months of league play gets nothing guaranteed from the NCAA. Lose a semifinal on a neutral floor in early March and a 16-2 conference season can end with no invitation at all.

For eighteen years the NIT was the safety net. Beginning with the 2006 event, the first under NCAA ownership, any regular-season conference champion that did not win its league tournament and was not picked for the NCAA field received an automatic place in the NIT. In a typical year a sizeable share of the 32 places was filled that way, which left fewer for the committee to choose.

The guarantee was withdrawn for the 2024 event. In its place the NCAA reserved twelve spots for the two best teams, by the NET rating, left out of the NCAA field from each of six conferences: the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. Leagues that had relied on the old rule objected loudly, and their complaint was easy to follow. A team that had gone 9-11 in a power conference now held a protected place that an outright champion of a smaller league did not.

The partial return

The guarantee came back for 2025 in a narrower form. A regular-season champion now receives an automatic bid only if its average ranking across seven rating systems is 125 or better. The seven are the NET, the Pomeroy and Torvik ratings, ESPN's Basketball Power Index, the KPI, and two résumé measures, strength of record and wins above bubble. The NCAA calls the average the KNIT.

That threshold does real work. Champions of the stronger mid-major leagues clear it comfortably. Champions of the lowest-rated conferences often do not, because playing a weak league schedule holds down every one of those seven numbers no matter how many games a team wins.

Small conferences care for reasons that go beyond one more home game. A postseason appearance is something a coach can sell to recruits and an athletic director can sell to donors, and in a one-bid league the regular-season title is the achievement that best reflects the quality of a team. Whether that title should be worth more is argued out at length in our guide to conference tournaments and automatic bids. The NIT's answer, for now, is that it is worth something if the computers agree.

Teams that say no: opt-outs, the portal and rival tournaments

An invitation can be declined, and since 2023 a striking number have been. North Carolina, which had begun the 2022-23 season ranked first in the country and then missed the NCAA field, announced within hours that it would not play in the NIT. A year later several power-conference schools turned the tournament down, among them St. John's, Pittsburgh and Oklahoma.

Coaches give different reasons in public. The underlying cause is mostly the calendar.

The transfer portal runs through the same weeks

When the NCAA created fixed transfer windows, the men's basketball window opened the day after Selection Sunday, which was the day before the NIT tipped off. Players on teams whose NCAA hopes had just ended could enter the portal that same morning. A coach preparing for an NIT first-round game might be doing so with eight available players, several of whom were taking calls from other programs, and with his own staff trying to recruit replacements at the same time.

The NCAA has since moved the window later and shortened it, which eases the problem without removing it. A roster in late March is still a group of players with decisions to make about money and playing time, and a secondary tournament is a hard thing to ask them to care about. Programs with a coaching change under way almost always decline.

The other tournaments

The NIT has never been the only alternative. The College Basketball Invitational was founded in 2008 by a private promoter, the Gazelle Group, and has been played at a single site in Daytona Beach, Florida, in recent years, with teams paying an entry fee to take part. The CollegeInsider.com tournament, aimed at mid-majors, followed in 2009.

The College Basketball Crown is the serious rival. Launched in Las Vegas in 2025 by Fox Sports and the arena company AEG, it built its field around agreements with the Big East, Big Ten and Big 12, and offered players a pool of name, image and likeness money. Nebraska won the first one. Teams from those three leagues that were tied to the Crown were contractually unavailable to the NIT, which is why the NIT's protected places in 2025 leaned on the ACC and SEC.

Read the NIT's selection changes of 2024 and 2025 in that light. They were less about fairness than about securing brand-name teams before a competitor could sign them.

The NIT as a rules laboratory

A tournament the NCAA owns, with real stakes but no national title riding on it, is a convenient place to test a rule before writing it into the book. The NCAA Men's Basketball Rules Committee has used the NIT that way several times, and the record is a decent guide to which ideas survive contact with actual games.

NIT	What was tried	What became of it
2015	Shot clock cut from 35 seconds to 30; restricted-area arc moved from 3 feet to 4	Both adopted for the 2015-16 men's season
2017	Team fouls reset at the 10-minute mark of each half, with two free throws from the fifth foul of a segment and no one-and-one	Not adopted for the men's game
2018	Four 10-minute quarters; three-point line at the international distance of 22 feet 1¾ inches; lane widened from 12 feet to 16	The line adopted for 2019-20; quarters not adopted; the lane stayed at 12 feet
2019	The same line and lane, plus a shot clock reset to 20 seconds after an offensive rebound, played in halves with team fouls reset at 10 minutes	The line and the 20-second reset adopted for 2019-20; the lane stayed at 12 feet

The shot clock experiment was the cleanest success. Scoring in the men's game had sagged badly by 2015, the 30-second clock was tried in that spring's secondary tournaments, and it was in the rulebook by autumn. The longer history, from no clock at all to 45 seconds to 35, is in our piece on the college shot clock.

The three-point line took two trials. Shooters in the 2018 and 2019 NITs made a slightly lower share of their attempts from the deeper line, which was the intention: the committee wanted to open the lane to drives and post play by pulling defenders farther from the basket, and to make the shot a little less automatic. The men's line moved from 20 feet 9 inches to the international distance in Division I for 2019-20. The current measurements for men, women and the professional leagues are set side by side in our guide to the college three-point line distance.

Two ideas were tried and left on the shelf. The 16-foot lane, standard in the NBA, changed little that anyone could measure and would have meant repainting every court in the country. Quarters have had a stranger fate. The women's college game adopted four 10-minute quarters in 2015-16 and has kept them. The men tried them in one NIT, went back to halves the next year, and were still playing halves through the 2025-26 season. The two formats also count team fouls differently, which is why the foul experiments of 2017 and 2019 were tied to the question of quarters.

Older than March Madness: 1938 and the Garden

College basketball's first big stage was a hockey and boxing arena on Eighth Avenue. In December 1934 a New York sportswriter named Ned Irish, who had turned promoter, booked two college games on the same night at Madison Square Garden and drew more than 16,000 people. The doubleheaders became a fixture. Teams from Kentucky, Indiana and the West Coast came east to play the New York schools, the city's newspapers covered them heavily, and a win at the Garden was the nearest thing the sport had to a national reputation.

The tournament followed from the doubleheaders. In March 1938 the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association invited six teams to the Garden for a postseason event to settle, as far as anyone could, which was the best in the country. Temple won it, beating Colorado 60-36 in the final. Colorado's best-known player was Byron "Whizzer" White, an All-America halfback who would later sit on the United States Supreme Court.

There were no qualifying rules. The writers invited whom they liked, which is where the name comes from.

The NIT was not quite the first national college tournament. A small-college event in Kansas City, the forerunner of the NAIA tournament, had begun in 1937. But among major programs the NIT came first, and the NCAA's coaches organized their own tournament the following spring partly in response. The first NCAA final, in March 1939, was played in a campus gym in Evanston, Illinois, and lost money. That month the NIT final at the Garden matched two unbeaten teams, Long Island University and Loyola of Chicago, and LIU won.

By 1940 the writers had handed the event to a committee of five New York colleges: Fordham, Manhattan, NYU, St. John's and Wagner. That group later took the name Metropolitan Intercollegiate Basketball Association, and it owned the tournament for the next 65 years.

When the NIT winner had a claim to be national champion

Through the 1940s the comparison between the two tournaments was closer than anyone under seventy now remembers, and in some years it favored the NIT. Its advantages were structural. It was played in the country's best-known arena, in its largest media market, in front of the writers whose stories went out on the national wires. It could invite any team it wanted. The NCAA tournament of the time took eight teams, one from each of eight geographic districts, so a strong region could send only one.

The fields reflected that. DePaul won the 1945 NIT with George Mikan at center. Kentucky under Adolph Rupp won it in 1946 and lost the 1947 final to Utah. Saint Louis, with Ed Macauley, won in 1948. The Helms Athletic Foundation, which later named national champions retroactively for the years before the polls, chose the NIT winners of 1938 and 1939, Temple and LIU, over anyone else.

A team could also play in both. Utah lost its opening game in the 1944 NIT, accepted a late place in the NCAA tournament when Arkansas withdrew, and won it. Kentucky lost in the 1949 NIT and then took the NCAA title. For three seasons during the Second World War the two champions met in a benefit game for the Red Cross at the Garden, and the NCAA champion won all three, which is the best evidence against the idea that the NIT was simply the stronger event.

City College, March 1950

One team ended the argument by winning both. City College of New York, coached by Nat Holman and unranked in the final Associated Press poll, was the last team invited to the 1950 NIT. It beat Bradley, the country's top-ranked team, in the final. Ten days later, in the same building, it beat Bradley again to win the NCAA championship.

No other school has won both in one season, and none will. The story did not end well, and the way it ended changed both tournaments.

How the NCAA tournament overtook it

In February 1951, less than a year after the double, three City College players were arrested on charges of taking money from gamblers to manipulate the scores of games. The Manhattan district attorney's investigation spread to seven schools and more than thirty players, among them men from LIU, NYU, Manhattan, Bradley, Toledo and Kentucky. Many of the fixed games had been played at Madison Square Garden.

The damage to New York basketball was lasting. LIU dropped the sport for several years. City College stepped down from major competition. The NCAA, which had played seven of its first twelve championship games at the Garden, did not bring its final back. An arena that had been the center of the sport became, in the eyes of college presidents across the country, the place where the gamblers were.

The NCAA then grew, and each expansion took teams the NIT would have invited. The NCAA field went to sixteen teams in 1951 and passed twenty soon after. The decisive step came in 1975, when the NCAA went to 32 teams and for the first time admitted a second team from one conference. Until then a league runner-up ranked in the national top five could find itself in the NIT.

• NCAA tournament
• NIT

19398teams6teams

195116teams12teams

197532teams16teams

198564teams32teams

201168teams32teams

Teams in each field in the year shown, from NCAA records. The NCAA field grows to 76 in 2027. The NIT also used 40 teams from 2002 through 2006.

Show the numbers

Field sizes of the two tournaments in selected years

Item	NCAA tournament	NIT
1939	8teams	6teams
1951	16teams	12teams
1975	32teams	16teams
1985	64teams	32teams
2011	68teams	32teams

Marquette says no

The last team to choose the NIT over the NCAA tournament was Marquette in 1970. Al McGuire's team was ranked eighth in the country and expected to be sent to the Mideast Regional in Dayton, Ohio. The NCAA committee assigned it instead to the Midwest Regional in Fort Worth, Texas. McGuire, a New Yorker who had played at St. John's, declined the bid, took his team to the Garden and won the NIT.

The NCAA made sure it could not happen twice. The following year it ruled that a school offered a place in its tournament must accept or stay out of postseason play altogether. That rule, later formalized as a "commitment to participate," turned the NIT from an alternative into a consolation by regulation. It was also the rule that eventually put both parties in a federal courtroom.

By 1977 the NIT's organizers had moved the early rounds out of the Garden to campus sites to save the event, keeping only the semifinals and final in New York.

The antitrust lawsuit and the $56.5 million purchase

The five New York colleges sued in 2001. Their case, filed in federal court in Manhattan, argued that the NCAA had used its power over college sports to wreck a competing tournament: first by forbidding invited teams to choose the NIT, then by expanding its own field again and again to absorb the teams the NIT might have taken. The commitment-to-participate rule sat at the center of the complaint.

It was a stronger case than the NCAA's public posture suggested. The association asked the court to dismiss it before trial and lost. The trial opened in August 2005, and the plaintiffs had put on a substantial part of their evidence when the two sides settled.

1. 11970Marquette declines an NCAA bid over its regional assignment and wins the NIT at Madison Square Garden.
2. 21971The NCAA rules that a school turning down its invitation may not play in any other postseason tournament.
3. 32001The five colleges that own the NIT sue the NCAA under federal antitrust law in the Southern District of New York.
4. 42005The case goes to trial in August. Before a verdict, the NCAA agrees to pay $56.5 million.
5. 52006The first NIT run by the NCAA is played, with a seeded bracket and a new selection committee.

The sequence as recorded in the litigation and the settlement announced in August 2005.

The terms were $56.5 million, paid over ten years. Of that, $40.5 million bought the postseason NIT and the preseason tournament that carried its name, and $16 million ended the litigation.

Nobody should mistake the purchase for sentiment. A verdict against the commitment rule could have let any invited team shop its services to another tournament, and a damages award under antitrust law is tripled. Buying the plaintiff was the cheaper course. It also left the NCAA as the owner of an event it had spent half a century diminishing, with every incentive to keep it alive and none to let it compete.

The new owner changed the tournament quickly. A selection committee of former coaches and administrators replaced the old invitation process, the bracket was seeded, the regular-season champion guarantee was introduced, and the field, which had been 40 teams since 2002, went back to 32 in 2007.

Leaving Madison Square Garden

For 84 years the NIT ended in the same place. Every final from 1938 through 2022 was played at Madison Square Garden, apart from 2020, when the event was canceled, and 2021, when a reduced 16-team tournament was held entirely in the Dallas suburbs. The Garden in question changed, since the arena moved to its present site above Penn Station in 1968, but the address on the invitation never did.

Then it did. The NCAA took the 2023 semifinals and final to Las Vegas and the next two to Indianapolis, its own headquarters city.

Year	Champion	Runner-up	Site of the final
2019	Texas	Lipscomb	Madison Square Garden, New York
2021	Memphis	Mississippi State	Comerica Center, Frisco, Texas
2022	Xavier	Texas A&M	Madison Square Garden, New York
2023	North Texas	UAB	Orleans Arena, Las Vegas
2024	Seton Hall	Indiana State	Hinkle Fieldhouse, Indianapolis
2025	Chattanooga	UC Irvine	Hinkle Fieldhouse, Indianapolis

The Indianapolis finals of 2024 and 2025 were played at Hinkle Fieldhouse, Butler University's brick arena opened in 1928, on the Thursday of Final Four week, two days before the national semifinals in another city. The NIT now ends as a prelude to the NCAA's showpiece weekend, and what that weekend has become is traced in our history of the Final Four.

What was lost is easy to name. "Playing at the Garden" was the NIT's whole pitch to a player from Kansas or Mississippi who had never been to New York, and it was the last physical link to the years when this was the tournament that mattered. An NIT final in Indianapolis is a good basketball game in a good basketball building with none of that attached.

What was gained is harder to romanticize and probably worth more. Crowds for the semifinals in New York had been thin for years, scattered through an arena built for nearly twenty thousand. A final sized to a college arena fills it, and staging it in Final Four week ties it to the NCAA's biggest basketball event. The NIT gave up its past for a place on someone else's calendar. Given the alternative, which was a slow fade in a half-empty Garden, the trade is defensible.

What an NIT title is worth now, and the tournaments that share the name

The jokes are old and everyone in college basketball knows them: the Not Invited Tournament, the Nobody's Interested Tournament. A fan base that expected the NCAA field will not hang an NIT banner with much pride, and several programs do not hang one at all.

For the right team it is still worth a good deal. The clearest value is time. A team that wins the NIT plays five more games and practices for three more weeks, and for a young roster that is most of an extra month together under game pressure. The record has examples. Indiana won the 1979 NIT and the NCAA title two years later. Virginia won the 1980 NIT with Ralph Sampson as a freshman and reached the Final Four in 1981. Wichita State won it in 2011 and played in the Final Four in 2013. TCU's 2017 title came a year before the program's first NCAA tournament appearance in two decades.

That argument has weakened, and honesty requires saying so. It assumed the same players would be back, and in the era of the transfer portal a March roster and a November roster can share only a few names. An NIT run is now more likely to raise the market value of the players who made it than to carry over to the next season. For seniors at a mid-major such as Chattanooga in 2025, none of that matters. They won a championship on a neutral floor in April.

The November tournament

The NIT Season Tip-Off is a different event with a shared name. It began in 1985 as the Preseason NIT, a November tournament run by the same New York colleges, with early games on campus and the last rounds at Madison Square Garden around Thanksgiving. Duke won the first one. The NCAA acquired it in the 2005 settlement along with the postseason event, renamed it, and later moved it out of the Garden. It is an early-season showcase with a small invited field and has no bearing on who plays in March.

The women's equivalents

Women's college basketball has two secondary tournaments, and their relationship mirrors the men's history in miniature. The older is the Women's National Invitation Tournament, or WNIT, which is run by a private company and has no connection to the NCAA or to the men's NIT beyond the borrowed name. The newer is the Women's Basketball Invitation Tournament, the WBIT, which the NCAA created and first staged in 2024 after an outside review pointed out that it funded a second tournament for men and nothing comparable for women.

The WBIT took first call on the best teams outside the NCAA field as soon as it launched, which is what NCAA ownership did for the men's NIT in 2006. Both are described in our guide to the women's NCAA tournament, and the rest of our college and professional coverage is collected in the basketball section.