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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TownesVanZandt_rivals" data-source="post: 131179874" data-attributes="member: 1606648">DePaul gave their NCAA spot away in 1944 for the NIT..Learn your history.Ohio State fan should know this<a href="https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/the-nit-was-awesome-until-the-ncaa-ruined-basketball/83025/">https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/the-nit-was-awesome-until-the-ncaa-ruined-basketball/83025/</a>In 1944, the Ohio State men’s basketball team suffered a devastating late regular season loss to DePaul University and its star, college hoop’s first great big man, 6-foot-9 George Mikan. 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. DePaul’s head-to-head win made it the favorite in the district. Ray Meyer, the head coach at DePaul, noticed the demeanor of Ohio State’s players and pulled aside their coach to let him know that they could have the NCAA slot. He’d rather send his Blue Demons to the National Invitation Tournament.Today that decision would seem like lunacy. The NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament — aka <a href="https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/the-cinderellas-of-march-madness-2017/75977">March Madness</a> — is attended by hundreds of thousands of fans; millions more watch on TV. The NIT is seen widely as a consolation prize for teams shut out of an NCAA invitation. But in the late 1930s and ’40s, DePaul was far from the only team to prefer the NIT. When fielding its roster, tournament organizers had a simple goal: Put the nation’s best teams in a single elimination competition — no matter where the selected schools were located.In those years, the NIT was a more prestigious tournament than the NCAA,” Meyer wrote in his autobiography Coach. “It was played in New York, while the NCAA was played on scattered campuses in smaller towns. 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. So the NIT meant a lot more to a struggling private school like DePaul.”The NIT also is the senior competition, organized in 1938 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 60-36. Inspired by the inaugural NIT, the NCAA launched its own spring tilt the following year. They had seen how successful a <a href="https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/in-college-basketball-look-out-for-the-defenders/80220">college basketball</a> 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 32-team format). In the 1944 final the Chicago squad bowed 47-39 to New York’s St. John’s University, which recorded its second straight NIT title. The following year, DePaul had its moment of glory, topping Bowling Green 71-54 as the bespectacled Mikan was named tournament MVP.“It was a national championship,” confirms Doug Bruno, current head coach of the DePaul women’s team who also played under Meyer from 1968 to 1973. “It was Madison Square Garden. It was the mecca of college basketball. It’s what everyone had their eyes on. The NCAA — yes, they had a tournament, but it was really an afterthought tournament at that point.”</blockquote>

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