Tuesday, March 13, 2012

The College Basketball Blog: 2012 CIT Predictions

It’s just about official: the superfluous postseason college basketball tournaments are here to stay. And you know what? I think it’s okay. 8 more teams will be playing in postseason college basketball tournaments this season. When you add the 4 postseason tournaments together (NCAA, NIT, CBI, CIT), 148 of 346 Division-I teams play in postseason tournaments. That’s 42.8%.

That may seem like a lot, until you consider that 70 of 120 FBS teams play in bowl games each year; or, 58.3%. Even with the extra postseason tournaments, there are still plenty of teams that don’t go to the postseason, including a number of teams that are as qualified as (or more qualified than) many of the teams that do go to a postseason tournament.

The one major difference is that unlike the non-BCS college bowl games—which many people still watch during the holidays if for no other reason than because it’s football and it’s on TV—the non-March Madness tournaments are completely ignored by all but CBB freaks and gamblers. While bowl games are an annual vacation for alumni and a reward for the players of all teams, the 2nd tier postseason basketball tournaments are seen as an embarrassment by some fan bases and might even seem like a nuisance to some of the players and coaches.

I’m not sure that will ever change. But if the NIT has survived this long; if the CBI was successful enough to spawn the CIT; and if the CIT has been well received enough for it to double in size over the last 2 years then something must be working. I for one enjoy it. I love college basketball and tournaments, so you’ll never hear me complain.


2012 CollegeInsider.com Tournament (CIT) Predictions

The CIT has been the butt of jokes ever since it began a few years ago because it came right on the heels of the CBI, which had been the first new postseason tournament in decades. Then the CIT expanded last year and people made jokes again. Well, guess what? It expanded again this season. So, laugh all you want, but it’s here to stay, and apparently it’s working, or else the people running it wouldn’t keep making it bigger.

The addition of 8 more teams this season is really a welcome sight because having 24 teams made the already problematic format of the tournament even more of a hassle. It makes much more sense to have 32 teams and have each team play the same number of games without having to worry about who gets a bye and who doesn’t.

This is the unofficial mid-major tournament. It’s been that way since the start. Sure, there are plenty of mid-major teams in the CBI and NIT (especially since the implementation of the rule insuring that all regular season conference champs who did not win their conference tournament or receive an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament would receive an automatic invite to the NIT), but the CIT has been and continues to be exclusively mid and low-majors.

There doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule outlawing teams from BCS conferences, but the tournament was created with the intent to invite teams from outside the 6 BCS conferences, and they haven’t strayed from that goal. Not everyone agrees on which non-BCS conferences should be considered “Major,” but there are teams included in the CIT from some of the non-BCS conferences which some people (including myself) would call “Major” or “High Major.” For the most part, however, the CIT field consists of true mid-majors and low-majors.

Like all of the non-March Madness postseason tournaments, the CIT is greatly affected by the fact that all of the games are played at home sites (the only exception to this among the 3 non-March Madness tournaments is the semifinals/finals portion of the NIT which is played at Madison Square Garden in New York). This is an unfortunate but apparently necessary aspect of the superfluous tournaments, as it not only skews the results towards the teams playing at home, but also takes away from the “tournament” feel of the events.

Outside of the field being strictly non-BCS conference teams, the one thing about the CIT that separates it from the other 2 non-March Madness tournaments is also its most annoying aspect, and that is that there really is no “bracket” per se. Not that more than a hundred or so people out there would take the time to fill out a CIT bracket if they could, but the fact that future matchups aren’t determined until each round is completed makes it just about impossible to do so. That’s no fun. Again, this certainly takes away from the “tournament” feel of the event.

The CIT states that RPI ranking is a factor in determining both matchup and location, but minimizing travel and class time missed are also given importance. While they don’t specifically say this, you get the feeling that convenience and availability often trump record/ranking during the scheduling process. The teams are not seeded (or at least the seeds aren’t ever given) and the teams aren’t even sectioned off into different regions (or at least not overtly). As you can imagine, this makes it pretty hard to predict the CIT.

But as you may know, when there are predictions to be made, I’m not one to shut it down just because the powers-that-be want to make things difficult. Just as I’ve done in the last few years I’ve simply tried to predict the CIT as best I can. There do seem to be a few distinct regions, at least for the first round, and so I’ve created four separate regions and given them names based on location. I then play these regions out until I have 4 national semifinalists.

The CIT doesn’t say that this is the way things are actually done. Thus, they may have teams playing each other from different regions in the 2nd and 3rd rounds, but I get the feeling that it will work more or less the way that I’ve drawn it up. Of course I may guess the future matchups and locations incorrectly even if I do pick all of the winners right, but what the hell. Once I have 4 national semifinalists, I again look at location when determining the matchups because that seems to be the most important aspect.

Who knows how close I’ll be to what the CIT determines? This is the best I can do, and at the very least, I can pick the first round games and an overall winner. Here are my picks.


First Round


South

Mercer over Tennessee State

Georgia State over Tennessee Tech

Rice over Louisiana-Lafayette

Kent State over USC Upstate


East

Old Dominion over Coastal Carolina

Manhattan over Albany

Fairfield over Yale

Buffalo over American


Midwest

Robert Morris over Indiana State

Toledo over McNeese State

Oakland over Bowling Green

Drake over North Dakota


West

Weber State over Utah Valley State

UC Santa Barbara over Idaho

Utah State over CS Bakersfield

Loyola-Marymount over CS Fullerton


Second Round


South

#1 Kent State over #4 Rice

#2 Mercer over #3 Georgia State


East

#1 Buffalo over #4 Manhattan

#3 Fairfield over #2 Old Dominion


Midwest

#1 Robert Morris over #4 Toledo

#2 Drake over #3 Oakland


West

#1 Weber State over #4 Utah State

#3 UC Santa Barbara over #2 Loyola-Marymount


Third Round


South

#1 Kent State over #2 Mercer


East

#1 Buffalo over #3 Fairfield


Midwest

#1 Robert Morris over #2 Drake


West

#1 Weber State over #3 UC Santa Barbara


Semifinals

#1 Weber State over #4 Robert Morris

#3 Kent State over #2 Buffalo


Finals

#1 Weber State over #3 Kent State


So those are my predictions for the 2012 CIT. Here’s a list of the conferences represented in this year’s CIT (ranked by conference RPI ranking), along with the teams from each conference (RPI listed for each team in parenthesis). That list is followed by this year’s CIT field of 32, listed by RPI rank.


2012 CIT Conference Breakdown

#8 MVC (2) [Indiana State (129); Drake (133)]

#9 C-USA (1) [Rice (170)]

#11 WCC (1) [Loyola-Marymount (120)]

#12 WAC (2) [Utah State (143); Idaho (147)]

#13 Ivy (1) [Yale (100)]

#15 CAA (2) [ODU (103); Georgia State (140)]

#16 Summit (1) [Oakland (142)]

#17 MAAC (2) [Fairfield (116); Manhattan (148)]

#18 MAC (4) [Buffalo (77); Kent State (104); Bowling Green (158); Toledo (248)]

#19 SBC (1) [ULL (187)]

#20 A-Sun (2) [Mercer (135); USC Upstate (141)]

#21 OVC ( 2) [Tennessee State (109); Tennessee Tech (137)]

#22 Patriot (1) [American (144)]

#24 Big West (2) [UCSB (123); CS Fullerton (157)]

#25 NEC (1) [Robert Morris (101)]

#26 Big Sky (1) [Webber State (71)]

#27 Southland (1) [McNeese State (175)]

#28 Big South (1) [Coastal Carolina (186)]

#29 America East (1) [Albany (214)]

#31 Great West (2) [Utah Valley State (230); North Dakota (244)]

#32 Independents (1) [Stony Brook (219)]


2012 CIT Field-of-32 by RPI Ranking

#70 Buffalo

#71 Webber State

#100 Yale

#101 Robert Morris

#103 Old Dominion

#104 Kent State

#109 Tennessee State

#116 Fairfield

#120 Loyola-Marymount

#123 UC Santa Barbara

#129 Indiana State

#133 Drake

#135 Mercer

#137 Tennessee Tech

#140 Georgia State

#141 UC Upstate

#142 Oakland

#143 Utah State

#144 American

#147 Idaho

#148 Manhattan

#157 CS Fullerton

#158 Bowling Green

#170 Rice

#175 McNeese State

#186 Coastal Carolina

#187 Louisiana-Lafayette

#214 Albany

#219 Cal State Bakersfield

#230 Utah Valley State

#244 North Dakota

#248 Toledo

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