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NCAA Announces Plans To Waste Time Seeding NIT Teams

Yeah, this will be an excellent use of everyone's time.

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On Wednesday afternoon, the NCAA announced that the men's basketball tournament selection committee would assist in the seeding of the National Invitation Tournament.  The committee's "First Four Out" will receive the #1 seeds in the NIT this season.

Well, okay, this makes logical sense, as they would be the four best teams not included in the field of 68.  Except for one problem.

Now the committee has to properly rank at large teams all the way down to number 36, the official cut line for the NCAA tournament, and then keep going for another four teams.  Really, they have to go at least five teams past the cut line, if not six or seven to get a proper feel for which teams deserve those NIT #1 seeds.  They have to put the time and effort into determining exactly where the line is between the fourth best team that isn't good enough to make the national championship tournament and the fifth best team that isn't good enough to make the national championship.

This is the same committee that is so bad at their jobs that back in 2011, they ended up with not one, but two second round games - Marquette vs. Syracuse & Cincinnati vs. Connecticut - featuring Big East teams playing against each other when regular season rematches are not supposed to occur until at least the Sweet 16 round.  The NCAA tournament bracketing has rules involved, and they're so busy taking selfies that they can't manage to actually sit down for a moment and make sure they're not completely ignoring them when they actually put the tournament field together. Now they're going to spend time evaluating at least five teams that will not be in the tournament and making sure they get those teams in the exact right order.

I'm not just saying they're taking selfies instead of doing their job, either.  This actually happened last year.

So yay.  When someone points out something that the committee screwed up inside of five minutes of the bracket being announced on CBS on March 15 - because you know it's going to happen now - just remember that those NIT #1 seeds were well thought out and everything's going to be okay.