NIT Offers Postseason Hope for Harvard

The Penn juggernaut is nearing in on a second straight Ivy League title and the automatic berth in the NCAA tournament that accompanies it. For the first time ever, though, that scenario may not spell the death of the Crimson’s postseason chances.

If Harvard (12-9, 4-4 Ivy) can regroup to take at least five of the remaining six games in its 2005-06 season, the team has a chance to advance to the National Invitational Tournament for the first time in school history.

First played in 1938, the NIT is the oldest postseason tournament in college basketball, although it has come to be overshadowed by the now more prestigious NCAA tournament, which began a year later. Originally hosting just six teams, the field of the NIT has grown throughout the years, with the most recent expansion in 2002 bringing the total number of invitees to 40. The NCAA recently bought out the NIT as part of the settlement of a lawsuit, making this year the first in which NCAA sanctioned officials will select the NIT field.

“There’s talk amongst people in the league [that with] the expansion of the NIT and the taking over of the NIT by the NCAA there’s a great chance that in the Ivy League or the Patriot League, the second place team [could] get the opportunity to slide into those spots,” coach Frank Sullivan said.

Harvard currently stands two games back in the loss column to second-place Princeton, but the Crimson still has a good shot at finishing ahead of the Tigers in the Ivy League standings. Princeton plays four of its remaining seven league games on the road, and still has a game each with Penn and Harvard. Yale and Cornell each rank a game ahead of Harvard with three league losses, but the Crimson will have the chance to even the score by playing the Bulldogs and Big Red at home down the stretch.

The last time an Ivy League squad made it into the NIT was 2002, when Penn, Yale and Princeton finished in a three-way tie for the title. The Quakers (25-6) beat out both the Bulldogs and the Tigers in the playoff to make the NCAA tournament, but Yale, with a record of 20-9, and Princeton, at 16-12, were both tabbed as members of the then newly enlarged NIT field.

This year, with the NCAA takeover, an Ivy League team could have an even better shot at advancing. In the past, there was speculation that the NIT selections were driven by television ratings and marketability of teams. The NCAA has stated that the selection process will be altered to make it more merit-based and inclusive of overlooked yet deserving programs.

“There’s a new landscape for postseason play with the NCAA taking over the NIT,” Sullivan said. “There’s 40 spots this year in the NIT, and they’ll be selected differently. Probably, [the NCAA will] spread the bids out among second place teams, so our chances, I believe, are better than they’ve been in awhile.”

Historically, to make the NIT teams need to have a Rating Percentage Index (RPI) of around 150 or lower. The RPI is a formula measuring strength of schedule maintained by the NCAA to help determine postseason participants. The formula is 25 percent team winning percentage, 50 percent average opponent winning percentage, and 25 percent the average winning percentage of the opponents of opponents.

Harvard’s current RPI is 176, the lowest of any Ivy team other than Penn. If the Crimson can take care of business in its four remaining home games, and steal a win in the difficult conditions of Princeton’s Jadwin Gym or the Palestra in Philadelphia, the team’s rating could potentially fall to the requisite level to be considered for the NIT.

Beyond the fact that it still has a shot at its first postseason appearance since 1946, the Crimson could also break the school record for most Division I victories in a season. Winning five of the last six games would give Harvard 17 wins, one more than the 16 Division I wins collected by the 1996-97 team. Additionally, with a sweep of this weekend’s series versus Brown and Yale, the Crimson would be guaranteed its first season above the .500 mark since 2001-02, the year before the current group of seniors reached Cambridge.

“It’s definitely big for us as seniors, who have gone through a lot, starting off great as freshman, then going through one of the worst [seasons] in the history of the program, then getting it back to respectability last year,” captain Matt Stehle said. “It’s definitely something that we hold in the back of our minds-we want to go out having

our best season.”

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Michael R. James contributed to the writing of this article.