The SEC made history on Sunday, setting the record for the most NCAA Tournament bids of any conference in history with 14 of the conference’s 16 teams being selected.
Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi State, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt were all selected to go dancing in March Madness, which paved the way for all 16 schools in the conference to have a chance at the postseason.
This was because, due to a drop in ratings and the creation of the “College Basketball Crown” tournament, the National Invitation Tournament or NIT changed the way it handed out bids to the event.
No longer offering auto bids to all conference regular season champions that didn’t qualify for the NCAA Tournament, the event announced it would distribute bids in a variety of ways, including to the two best ACC and SEC schools not selected for March Madness. This was because the Big East, Big 12 and Big Ten have an existing deal with “The Crown.”
With 14 of the 16 SEC schools qualifying for the big dance, the only two left to receive the NIT bids, by default, were LSU and South Carolina, which finished 14-18 (3-15 SEC) and 12-20 (2-16) respectively.
Sure enough, despite plenty of sweat by the Longhorn faithful ahead of Selection Sunday, Texas was included in the NCAA Tournament as one of the last four in and the NIT stayed true to its format, inviting both South Carolina and LSU to the event.
Both declined.
The move was a tad surprising in the case of South Carolina after reports surfaced that Gamecocks Head Coach Lamont Paris may consider accepting a bid if offered, but LSU’s Matt McMahon never provided such hope of additional Tiger basketball.
Looking first at South Carolina, The Post and Courier first reported during the ongoing SEC Tournament that sources close to the program stated the Gamecocks would accept a bid if offered, despite ongoing questions as to whether or not star Collin Murray-Boyles would consider playing as he potentially prepares for the NBA draft.
“I don’t know what he’s thinking, first,” Paris said of Murray-Boyles after the SEC Tournament. “I haven’t really thought about any of that stuff. There will be a lot of people that will be making a decision on whether they’re going to go to the draft or stay. I’ve always believed, this is about these young men, trying to help them. When their opportunity is the right opportunity, they should do exactly what they believe is the best for them. If I can provide a little advice for him, it won’t be slanted in any direction. That’s just not who I am.”
Paris was not asked about the NIT after his team’s elimination from the SEC Tournament as Texas had not yet gone on to lock itself into the field.
When the NIT offer came, however, South Carolina turned it down and Paris was willing to explain the decision.
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for the NIT and the exciting opportunity it provides good teams to continue playing for a championship,” Paris said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to some attrition on our roster with injuries we decided it was best not to participate this year. We will build on that and start our work immediately as we look to make a return to the NCAA Tournament in 2026.”
As for LSU, the Tigers had an extremely rough season, suffering numerous blowouts late as the team, already suffering from a significantly lower NIL budget than most of the conference, began to unravel.
Following a crushing loss to Mississippi State in the first round of the SEC Tournament, McMahon was asked about whether or not the Tigers would accept a bid to the NIT, to which he offered the following:
“We haven’t even looked that far down the road. Just been locked in on trying to figure out ways to give ourselves a chance as we’ve had some of these injuries and illnesses and stuff down the stretch. Haven’t even thought about what the next step would be there.”
In coach speak, that’s a, “we’re not going.”
Ole Miss Head Coach Chris Beard was similarly cryptic following his team’s elimination from the 2024 SEC Tournament. The Rebels missed out on the big dance and promptly declined an invite to the NIT.
With LSU promising to increase the NIL support for the men’s basketball program and reports that McMahon is going to be “aggressive” in the transfer portal in an attempt to prove he is the right man for the job, it’s unsurprising the program wished to simply turn the page on a disastrous season.
Both schools were hardly the first to decline NIT bids following their lack of inclusion into the “main” tournament as doing so has become extremely common around the sport.
Ole Miss notably did so last year, but even this season, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh and Indiana all declined bids to the tournament, with the Hoosiers, looking to move on from Mike Woodson, also declining an invitation to “The Crown.” North Carolina also famously declined after going from preseason No. 1 to missing the tournament entirely in 2023.
The reality for the NIT is that the once prestigious tournament — so prestigious that Bob Knight declined an NCAA Tournament bid at Army in 1968 in favor of the event, robbing the Knights of what would have been their only appearance in the big dance — is simply undesirable to most high major programs. Online the event is dubbed the “Not Invited Tournament,” a reference to its field being schools that were deemed “not good enough” for the big dance.
With the NCAA Tournament field now at 68 teams, any program within a high major conference unable to make the dance as an at-large team surely went through rough times in the regular season. On top of that, for the better teams just left out of the field, the consolation prize can feel more insulting than rewarding.
In fact, of the 41 teams from Power Five conferences that didn’t make the NCAA Tournament in 2025, only four — SMU, Stanford, Oklahoma State and Georgia Tech — accepted NIT bids. Sure, not all 41 were invited, but the figure is jarring nonetheless.
While some schools with solid brand value such as Santa Clara, Loyola Chicago, Dayton and FAU can be found in the tournament, the field also includes teams such as Jacksonville State, CSU Northridge, North Alabama, Kent State and UC Riverside — and that’s not even counting the auto bids, Chattanooga and Northern Colorado.
All in all, in a year that saw the SEC reach the pinnacle of the sport as it hopes to secure its first national championship in over a decade, the NIT continues to sink lower into irrelevancy as the conference’s literal last place teams chose to prioritize preparing for next season over a chance for a second-tier trophy.
