The National Invitation Tournament changed up which teams are getting an invitation next March.
The NIT board of managers announced Friday that it will modify its team selection format and experiment with rule changes for the 2024 tournament.
In years past, the tournament guaranteed that any regular-season conference champions who did not win their conference tournament would qualify for the NCAA Tournament. This rule often helped teams from mid-major conferences, such as North Texas, the 2023 NIT champion.
That rule won’t be in place for 2024. Instead, the top two teams in the NCAA’s NET rankings from each of the “Power Six” conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — that do not reach the NCAA Tournament will earn automatic invitations to the NIT.
Those 12 teams will be guaranteed the opportunity to host a first-round game. The NIT will then select “the 20 best teams available” to round out its field of 32. Four of those 12 will be first-round hosts.
The board of managers also agreed to implement experimental rules for the 2024 event. The free throw lane will be widened from 12 to 16 feet, matching the width used by the NBA and FIBA. And instead of using a “floating media timeout” in the second half along with timeouts after the 16-, 12-, 8- and 4-minute marks, the timeouts will occur on the first stoppage of play after the 17-, 14-, 8- and 4-minute marks.
The NIT semifinals and finals will be played in Indianapolis in 2024. After decades at Madison Square Garden in New York, the tournament’s final four moved to Las Vegas in 2023.
–Field Level Media