There won’t be a CIT in 2021, but does that even matter?
For the second postseason in a row the CollegeInsider.com Tournament (CIT) won’t be happening due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A mid-major only tournament, started in 2009, the CIT sits fourth in the postseason pecking order below the NCAA, NIT and CBI tournaments. As far as I’m concerned, news of its cancellation should be of no concern to the teams of the West Coast Conference. I wouldn’t have said this a few years ago, but at this point the league has outgrown the CIT. An invitation to it should not be viewed an accomplishment considering where the league is in the year 2021 and the growth it hopes to continue experiencing in the years to come.
The WCC has sent 11 teams to the CIT over its 11 year history. Though, over the past five years, only one WCC team has taken part. That would be San Diego in 2018, which finished 20–14, tied for fourth in the WCC, and made it to the CIT quarterfinals.
In 2019 both BYU (19–13, 11–5, 3rd) and San Francisco (21–10, 9–7, 4th), were postseason hopefuls. The Dons were in the NCAA bubble conversation deep into January, before losing seven of their final 11 games in an inexplicable fall from grace.
When Selection Sunday had come and gone and neither BYU nor San Francisco heard their name called by the NCAA or NIT, the programs pulled the plug on their respective seasons. They didn’t even consider the CBI, much less the CIT.
“The primary focus of the BYU basketball programs is to qualify for the NCAA Tournament, or as a secondary option the National Invitation Tournament. With that in mind, we have determined that our men’s basketball team will not participate in the other postseason events this year,” BYU athletic director Tom Holmoe said in a statement.
A brand like BYU is unique in the WCC. It’s a huge school, with a big athletics budget and massive arena. In men’s basketball, it’s second only to Gonzaga when it comes to a history of, and expectation for, success. In that sense, Holmoe’s statement makes perfect sense. For BYU, a trip to the CIT isn’t an accomplishment. Anything short of the NIT represents a failure of a season.
But what about the rest of the league? The small schools without the resources, history and expectations of BYU and Gonzaga, as well as Saint Mary’s to some extent. The schools that, in their most successful seasons ever, with their most talented rosters in history, however you want to view it, still find themselves unable to overtake the Zags/Cougars/Gaels triumvirate. What about the teams that are without question good, if not great relative to program history, but simply can’t make it to the NCAA tournament because of the top-heavy nature of the WCC? Wouldn’t making the CIT be considered an accomplishment for them?
In years past, yes. Now though?
“The disappointment of not getting an invitation to the NIT is a testament to how far the program has come so quickly,” San Francisco’s then head coach Kyle Smith said in a statement regarding the end of the Dons’ 2019 season.
Read between the lines on that and you could easily conclude that for San Francisco in 2019, playing in the CIT wasn’t considered an accomplishment. So, they just didn’t play in it.
Every team in the West Coast Conference should adopt that mindset. It’s not 2009 or 2012 or 2015 anymore.
Look back to that 2019 season once again. Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s made the NCAA Tournament. BYU and San Francisco were shut out of the NIT, but the league wasn’t. San Diego, which finished seventh in the standings, snuck into the NIT as an 8 seed. While it is somewhat strange that the third and fourth place teams in the league didn’t earn a berth in the NIT but the team that finished seventh did, it’s also a testament to the strength of the WCC, from top to bottom.
San Diego was 11–4 entering league play before a rash of injuries hampered the Toreros, who were subsequently beaten to a 7–9 pulp as they tried to run the conference gauntlet. At full health in the conference tournament, though, they beat Portland, Santa Clara and BYU before falling to Saint Mary’s in the semis.
The NIT selection committee clearly noticed that, and rewarded the Toreros for it. If that team — which, to be honest, I loved; objectivity in journalism be damned, that team was fun as hell and I rooted for them all year long — if that team can make it to the NIT with a sub-.500 record in league play, then it’s fair to say the NIT is a reasonable goal for any team in this league, in any season, except for Portland (the importance of honesty is the theme of this sloppy, choppy run on sentence).
If that’s the case, that the NIT is a reasonable expectation, then maybe it’s time to cut the CIT out altogether.
To be fair, the CIT has been pretty good to the WCC over the years. There was a time when playing in the tournament made sense for the good teams stuck beneath the league’s top-tier.
There were some great CIT moments for the WCC’s participants, too.
Santa Clara won it in 2011. Kevin Foster was named tournament MVP, a great honor for one of the league’s all-time ballers. Two years later they won the CBI, and that experience in the CIT no doubt helped propel that group to win their second postseason title. That postseason run saw the Broncos beat Purdue in Mackey Arena in the CBI’s second round. Purdue finished two games below .500, but it’s still Purdue, a Big Ten team, in Mackey Arena. The Boilermakers finished 74th in KenPom that year, two spots ahead of the Broncos (remember these numbers for later).
Loyola Marymount’s best season since the Kimble/Gathers era came in 2012. The Lions had wins over BYU and Saint Mary’s, both of whom made the NCAA Tournament, and were it not for a opening game loss in the WCC tournament, they’d likely have made the NIT. In the CIT instead, they advanced to the quarterfinals, ending Damian Lillard’s collegiate career in the process with a dramatic overtime win against Weber State.
Pacific and San Diego accepted invitations to the CIT in 2014. The Tigers advanced to the semifinals by knocking the Toreros out in the quarterfinals.
In 2016, Kyle Smith was the head coach at Columbia and he led the Lions to a CIT championship. One day after picking up that win, he was named head coach at San Francisco. The Dons didn’t hire him simply because of that, of course, but it’s still a nice way to wrap up a successful six year run at Columbia. A parting gift of sorts.
I want to be clear, I’m not discounting any of the accomplishments that WCC teams have had in the CIT. And I’m not trying to slight any of the WCC teams that have played in it. What those teams did and accomplished in those seasons, and in those trips to the CIT, is important and should be celebrated.
Once upon a time Gonzaga celebrated simply making the NCAA Tournament. The Zags have made 21 straight NCAA Tournaments, won in the Round of 64 in 11 straight and advanced to the past five Sweet Sixteens, simply making the NCAA Tournament isn’t something to celebrate anymore. That doesn’t mean that people in Spokane look back on those teams from the first decade of the 21st century, the teams that sometimes bowed out in the first or second round, as underachievers. It’s understood that once upon a time, that was considered successful for the Zags. And that those successes helped elevate the program to a level where, these days, anything short of the Elite Eight in any given season can be considered an underachievement. Those successes raised Gonzaga’s ceiling.
Apply that line of thinking to the CIT.
In 2011 there were eight teams in the West Coast Conference and five of them made the postseason. Gonzaga was in the big dance, Saint Mary’s made the NIT and Portland, Loyola Marymount and Santa Clara played in the CIT. Back then, that was a banner year. A resounding success for the teams involved and the league as a whole.
Today the league has 10 teams. A banner year now is to get three teams into the NCAA Tournament, not three into the CIT. A successful season will see the WCC as a multi-bid league to the NCAA Tournament, and maybe the NIT, too, with whatever teams finish above .500 but miss out on those two either landing in the CBI or calling it a season because, to them, the goal now is higher than it used to be.
Plus, I think the CIT kinda sucks. Don’t let the mid-major focus of the tournament fool you, it sucks. And no, I don’t just mean because the still-reigning champions, Marshall, were ranked 154th in KenPom after winning in 2019, and to win it the Thundering Herd had to get through a murderers’ row of sub-.500 IUPUI (191st), Presbyterian (179th), a Hampton team that entered the CIT under .500 (170th) and a Green Bay team that entered the CIT just one game above .500 (181st). [Remember those numbers from earlier? That’s the difference between the CBI and the CIT.]
I’m all about giving these mid-majors, that are structurally disadvantaged by the powers that be in college basketball, a shot at some glory. That Marshall team, for example, was led by a pair of seniors in Jon Elmore and C.J. Burks who put together exceptional careers at Marshall. The CIT, in theory, is a great way for a mid-major program like Marshall to send off a special pair like those two. The CIT, in theory, is great for a program like Liberty (an abhorrently despicable institution, as far as I’m concerned) which used back-to-back, progressively deeper CIT runs in 2017 and 2018 to prime itself for a run into the 2019 NCAA Tournament. The CIT, in theory, is a good thing for mid-major basketball.
But it sucks, because it’s not the righteous celebration of the unheralded but deserving players and teams from the mid-major level that it seems. It’s a pay-for-play scheme. According to reporting by Deseret News on that 2019 BYU team which declined any postseason offers, it costs $50,000 for a team to host a game. That’s no small chunk of change, especially at the mid-major level.
Now, the CBI also charges teams $50,000, and that’s just to participate, but the CBI doesn’t pretend it’s some honorable savior of mid-majordom. The CBI is very clear about what it is. It’s sponsored by a company that sells generic Viagra. There’s an ad for ED pills literally in the CBI logo, and it’s bigger than the words “College Basketball Invitational” so, they’re really not trying to hide what they are. Oh yeah, and the CBI lands better teams than the CIT, and that matters.
Anyway…
I think the CIT sucks, and it’s cancelled this season, as it was last season, due to the pandemic. Personally, I’d like to see it cancel itself permanently if it won’t get rid of that insane entry fee. And if they won’t, at the very least they could drop the pretense and just sell all the way out like the “Roman CBI” did (look at all of these official releases from universities, including LMU, that have the name of a dick pill company in them, it’s hilarious).
Short of that, though, I’d like to see WCC teams continue to decline invitations to it. It helped the league grow in the first half of the 2010s, but the league’s certainly outgrown it now. The league has reached a point where, honestly, it’s too good for the CIT. It’s reached a point where the bar for success can be raised, and unfortunately for the CIT, raised above the level of this postseason tournament. The league is trying to get stronger, and when you’re trying to get stronger eventually you put down the 10 pound dumbbells and you start lifting something heavier. You can go back to the 10 pounder, but it won’t do you as much good as it used to.
Which, in other words, means you just read 2,113 words on why news about the CIT shouldn’t matter to any West Coast Conference team this season. Not in 2021, and not in any season going forward.
