NIT Round 1; NCAAT First Four: Open Thread

B1G Basketball is with us once again! After a comically long layoff since the BTT ended, Penn State and Nebraska get the moderately-sized orange-ish ball sport going once again for our conference. PSU gets a home game against the Temple at 8:00 p.m. (ESPNU), and Nebraska gets to spend a lovely evening in Starkville, Mississippi delivering a beatdown to actualMSU, starting at 9:00 p.m (ESPN2). Unlike that glorified brand name showoff festival of a basketball tournament known as the NCAA Tournament, the teams playing tonight had to be INVITED to play. I mean, it’s the I in NIT (right? I have no idea)!

[insert jif of Homer Simpson asking what the I, then the P, then the V stands for in VIP, then asking what the I stands for again]

Read this for more info on the Big Ten’s NIT teams, hopes, and dreams, along with a bunch of uninformed answers to questions about things you never knew you never knew.

Read BRT’s preview for a much more in-depth discussion and analysis of tonight’s games.

Also, the First Four open thread is BACK y’all, this time with a fancy table instead of Beez’s artisinal, hand-crafted schedule of games.

As with last night, no porn, no links to illegal/unauthorized streams of games, no wheezing the ju-uice.

Winner of the North Carolina Central vs. Texas Southern gets Xavier in Nashville, while the Arizona State University vs. Syracuse winner earns a trip to Detroit to play TCU and, eventually, Bucknell.

Go NC Central and not-Syracuse.