CBI and CIT

Time for my annual CBI/CIT suggestion post.  I won't say much, if you look in my archives to last year you can see a similar rant.

My bottom line is this:  we need a 3rd postseason tournament, behind the NIT.  There's many good teams who deserve a postseason who don't make the NIT.  Just this year, teams like Yale didn't make the NIT, and this does allow most if not all of 2nd and 3rd place finishers in conferences the chance to play in postseason.  I think we can come into agreement that these tournaments are perfect to reward teams that just came short of winning their smaller conference.

However, we don't need 2 of them.  We need one of them, the CBI or CIT, and not both.  Right now these two tourneys add 48 postseason teams, to stretch to 148 across all D1.  That's too many.  I'd rather have 16 or 24 added teams, instead of 48, to narrow it down to, say, 116 postseason teams across all D1 (almost a perfect 1-in-3 ratio).

My preference:  kill the CBI.  Power conference teams almost always decline it, and I'd be okay with keeping power conference teams out of the CIT after they get rejected by the NIT.  They don't need the CIT anyways.

The CIT is a celebration of good mid-major basketball, and should continue.  I'm not sure if they need 32 teams though.  If it stays at 32, I'm ok with it, but 16 or 24 is fine too.  There should always be room for teams like this year's Yale, Chattanooga, Cleveland St, Georgia Southern, et al.  All those Big South contenders this year?  More than 2 of them deserve a postseason (and they got them this year).  All those MAC contenders?  They deserve more.  And so on and so on.  Let's tighten the fat, so that we don't have to admit a lousy Colorado team or marginal mid-majors.  We can have the best of both worlds here.