Aggie Hoops Postseason Outlook

Good afternoon, gang.

It’s Selection Sunday, so let’s take a look at the available tournaments and try to figure out where the Aggies are headed.

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The NCAA Tournament?

Short Answer: Nope.

Long Answer: Nooooooooooooooooope.

The NIT?

Short Answer: The conference tourneys broke our way, but it’s going to be close.

Long Answer: The NIT is tough to project in early March, as the tournament guarantees a spot to every conference regular season champion that does not win their tournament. Which basically boils down to “every time a one-bid conference tournament isn’t won by the #1 seed.” This happens between 10-15+ times per season, so you know you’re going to lose some spots to that process... you just don’t know how many.

This year, we’re only looking at 10-11 bids gone... which is about as good as we could have hoped for. In the last 12 hours, I’ve seen us as a 6 seed, a 7 seed, and missing the tournament entirely. It’s going to be close.

If that doesn’t work out for us, we’ve got one final decision to make...

A Sub-NIT Tournament? (CBI, Vegas 16, or CIT)

Short Answer: We’ve got a spot if we want one, but we shouldn’t accept a bid.

Long Answer: These tournaments are not meant for power five teams.

• The CBI had no P5 teams last year, one (Colorado) in 2015, and three (Texas A&M, Penn State, and Oregon State) in 2014.
• The 2016 CIT was supposed to include 32 teams, but they could only find 26 teams (and no P5 teams) that were interested.
• And the Vegas 16? Probably fair to assume that they were hoping for 16 teams... and they could only find eight. Again, none of which came from a P5 conference.

These tournaments would do nothing for our program. If we don’t make the NIT, we need to turn these suckers down.

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Those are the available options. No matter what happens today, we’ll keep you posted.