St. Joe’s remarkable NIT victory shows that March Madness is still great but will never be the same

The NCAA Tournament has been expanding. Not the field. The Tournament. It has grown, and it is still growing, and there’s no going back.

Thirty years ago, in 1996, the Final Four was held at Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, N.J.; the final attendance was 19,229. No host venue has been so small since — nothing but domes and football stadiums and ballparks with capacities of 65,000 to 80,000.

The 16 teams to qualify for this year’s regional semifinals are all from power conferences, just like the 16 teams that qualified for last year’s regional semifinals. The mid-majors can’t get out of the first weekend anymore, not in the age of NIL, not when so many of their best players are transferring to higher-profile programs every year.

And the public seems to love the bigness (and the gambling possibilities): The channels and networks televising the tournament claimed in a news release Monday that more people watched Thursday’s games than any other slate of opening-day first-round games in history.

Then there’s the NIT.

Around 12:15 a.m. West Coast time Monday, just hours after they had rallied from a 19-point deficit to beat Cal, 76-75, most of the members of the St. Joseph’s men’s basketball team boarded a 30-seat plane in San Francisco to fly to Albuquerque, N.M., for the NIT quarterfinals. Five other members of the traveling party — play-by-play voice Matt Martucci, general manager Joe Mihalich Jr., assistant director of operations Chris Marino, and two managers — had managed to get on a commercial flight a few hours earlier. The Hawks, they all hoped, would then rendezvous in time for a 6 p.m. practice to prepare for their semifinal game Tuesday night against New Mexico.

This after St. Joe’s had flown a charter from Philadelphia to Fort Collins, Colo., last week, beaten Colorado State, 69-64, in the first round, then hopped a commercial flight directly to San Fran to play Cal.

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Martucci and his wife, Stephanie, have two young daughters. He hasn’t been home in a week, and he won’t be until Wednesday.

“Mihalich and I have decided we’re going to get a two-for-one on divorce attorneys,” he said Monday by phone. “When we were looking at flights, all the options stunk. It’s tough, but it’s not outrageous, not impossible.”

This is the NIT. At least for the moment.

That caveat is necessary, because there’s no telling how long the NIT will be around. In the early 1950s, it was considered a more prestigious event than the NCAA Tournament, mostly because New York was the capital of college basketball at the time and the NIT’s semifinals and final were played at Madison Square Garden.

Even as late as 1970, the NIT retained enough cachet that Marquette coach Al McGuire turned down an at-large bid to the NCAAs to compete in the NIT; Marquette then won the tournament. But as the NCAA Tournament has grown over time, the NIT has in turn shrunk, and it’s so small now in comparison that it’s fair to wonder how long it will last.

Just look at this year’s field. Of the 32 teams in the 2026 NIT, just four are from power conferences. Cal, which is now in the ACC, was one of those four, but the Golden Bears haven’t qualified for the NCAA Tournament since 2016, and first-year coach Mark Madsen accepted an NIT bid this year as a step toward turning the program around. Plus, the College Basketball Crown, founded last year by Fox Sports and Anschutz Entertainment Group, now pulls eight power-conference programs away from the NIT, too.

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That the NIT is fading in influence and prestige is not news, of course. Still, it is another indication of how the little guys — the mid-majors — are getting shoved out of the college basketball scene. Take nothing away from St. Joe’s: Its comeback Sunday night was remarkable on its merits, and Martucci’s thrilling call of the game’s closing moments has gone viral since. But one of the reasons, maybe the primary reason, that the Hawks’ victory has resonated is the veneer of a David-Goliath upset. In terms of resources and perception, Cal is a giant. St. Joe’s, by any measure, is not.

These kinds of matchups are already rarer in the NCAA Tournament, though, and they’re likely to be rarer in the NIT, as well, as the divide between power schools and mid-majors widens.

The former will compete among themselves, and the latter will compete among themselves, and as great as the NCAA Tournament has been and still is, the mom-and-pop charm of March Madness will slowly disappear. St. Joe’s is grasping at the last remnants of it, with a run in an event that is fading away.

“It’s not going back in the box again,” Martucci said. “The purity of the game is gone, but there is an inherent desire for kids who are playing a kids’ game. Seeing how much the guys on this team love each other, it’s a shot of adrenaline. When the game starts, it’s still fun.”