The NIT Season Tip-Off is an annual college basketball tournament that takes place in November of each year, around the beginning of the season. The first two rounds are held at campus sites and the semifinals and the finals are held at Madison Square Garden. The tournament began in 1985 as the Preseason NIT, so called to distinguish it from the post-season NIT. In 2005, the NCAA purchased the Men's Preseason and Postseason NIT and renamed the November tournament the NIT Season Tip-Off. The tournament remains one of the most well-known preseason tournaments, along with the Maui Invitational and the Great Alaska Shootout.
The tournament had a new format in 2006. The first two rounds were held at regional "common sites" instead of campus sites, making the format more like the postseason NCAA Tournament. The semifinals and finals were still held at Madison Square Garden. In 2006, the common sites were Charlotte, N.C., Nashville, Tenn., Indianapolis and Spokane, Wash. The tournament returned to its previous format in 2007 then returned to the 2006 format in 2009.
Read more about NIT Season Tip-Off: Past Championship Games, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007
Famous quotes containing the word season:
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)