School goes against player vote, accepts NIT invitation

By Ross Kelly March 12, 2018 at 11:57am

With everything that has transpired with Louisville’s men’s basketball program this season, you wouldn’t blame the team’s players if they wanted the season to end as soon as possible.

They would, of course, be willing to play in the NCAA tournament if they made the cut, but the Cardinals weren’t one of the at-large selections despite a 20-13 record.

However, they did get selected to another postseason tournament, the NIT. While playing in the NCAA tournament is a luxury, appearing in the NIT can seem like a chore, and with everything the Cardinals have been through, it came as no surprise that the players voted against playing in the NIT.

But in what can be considered a microcosm of college athletics, the players’ voices didn’t matter, and Louisville went ahead and accepted the NIT bid.

There’s money to be made by playing in postseason games (for everyone except the student-athletes), and the Louisville administrators are happy to host Northern Kentucky in the first round come Tuesday night.

Per Jeff Greer of the Courier Journal, the Louisville players voted against the NIT before the ACC tournament began last week. They then held a players-only meeting Sunday after they were left out of the NCAA tournament.

Louisville’s interim athletic director, Vince Tyra, said he had to make a decision on the NIT at the same time he made a decision on the NCAA tournament.

“They send the invite, and you have to do it in parallel, that if you do fall to the NIT, that you will indeed accept the bid,” Tyra said Wednesday. “So we will play if there is that opportunity. I hope there isn’t. … But if indeed that does happen, we would play.”

Babies.

— Jeremy (@Jeremy2272) March 12, 2018

Do you think Louisville should have skipped the NIT?

Louisville was among the “First Four Out” on Joe Lunardi’s last bracketology projections Sunday. It ended the season with a 17-point loss to the overall No. 1 seed, Virginia, in the ACC tournament quarterfinals.

But the Cardinals’ on-court play is just one of the reasons many think they were left out of the NCAA tournament. This has been arguably the most controversial and corrupt season in recent college basketball history, and Louisville is right at the center of it.

Before the season even started, Louisville was one of the schools implicated in a pay-for-play scheme and was under investigation by the FBI. Top recruit Brian Bowen was named as an anonymous player whom Adidas conspired to pay $100,000 for his signing with Louisville.

Bowen was later cleared by the FBI but was suspended from all basketball activities. In January he left Louisville and enrolled at South Carolina, where he will be eligible to play in January 2019.

As part of the fallout from this FBI probe, coach Rick Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich were fired with cause. Nearly the entire Louisville coaching staff was wiped out, and assistant coach David Padgett, who’s never had a head coaching job, was promoted to head coach.

Then in February, the NCAA denied Louisville’s appeal of what it called “draconian penalties” — including stripping the program of its 2013 national title — resulting from a sex scandal that involved strippers and prostitutes. The Cardinals became the first program in the modern era of the NCAA to vacate a national championship.

None of the current players was on that 2013 team, and none was involved with the sex scandal or the FBI probe. But this has been a mentally exhausting season for the young men, and despite their efforts to end it, the season is not over just yet.

https://twitter.com/drizzleman32/status/973227469330411520

Louisville will be a No. 2 seed in the new-look NIT, which will experiment with various rule changes. Among those are four 10-minute quarters, the elimination of “one-and-one” foul shots and a longer 3-point line.

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