Women's National Invitation Tournament - Format

Format

The WNIT started in 1998 as a sixteen team tournament. It was doubled to a thirty-two team tournament in 1999. In 2006, competing schools assumed more responsibility, hosting the early rounds of the tourney, and additional expansion was made to forty teams. At that time, schools which won their regular season conference title but were excluded from the NCAA tournament by having lost their conference tournament were awarded automatic bids. The field was further expanded in 2007 to forty-eight teams, with automatic bids awarded to each Division I conference. The tournament was expanded to its current sixty-four teams in 2010.

Each of the thirty-one college conferences will receive an automatic bid, with thirty-three teams selected at-large. If a conference’s automatic qualifier team declines the WNIT invitation, the conference forfeits that automatic spot, and that selection goes into the pool of at-large schools. The bids are announced on the evening of the same day that the NCAA tourney bids are made.

The current, sixty-four team tournament has thirty-two first round games, followed by sixteen second-round games, eight third-round games, four quarterfinal games, two semifinal games, and the championship. All games are played on the site of host schools, with the host usually being the school with the better seed. The national championship game is currently carried on cable on the CBS Sports Network.