The UC Irvine men’s basketball team is headed to the NIT for the third straight season, but it isn’t the destination of choice.
After failing to win the Big West Tournament for a fifth consecutive season, the Anteaters accepted the consolation prize on Sunday and were named one of the four No. 1 seeds in the 32-team tournament.
UCI will host Northern Colorado in a first-round game on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Bren Events Center.
Cal State Northridge and UC Riverside were also selected to the NIT field and will begin play on Tuesday.
CSUN landed in the San Francisco Region and will travel to face second-seeded Stanford. UCR is on the same side of the bracket as UCI and will visit second-seeded Santa Clara.
The Anteaters had their eyes on qualifying for the 68-team NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2019, but they needed to beat top-seeded UC San Diego in the championship game of the conference tournament on Saturday night in Henderson, Nevada and they came up short, 75-61.
“There will be postseason play for us, but it’s undeniable the devastating feeling of falling short of the goal of playing in March Madness,” UCI coach Russell Turner said. “It’s hard to describe that, in a league like ours and a situation like ours, where we knew if we’d win we’d reach the mountain top, and if we did not win (Saturday) night, like we didn’t, we would feel like we failed. It’s hard.”
UCI compiled a 28-6 record and went 10-2 against the best nonconference schedule Turner could patch together, but he knew all along it wouldn’t be strong enough to impress the NCAA selection committee if the Anteaters didn’t win the tournament title and earn the Big West’s automatic bid.
Every game in Division I falls into one of four quadrants based on each team’s NET rankings and the game location, and the selection committee relies on the system to evaluate the quality of each team’s wins and losses.
UCI played in just two Quad 1 games all season, both against UCSD, and split those games.
North Carolina, on the other hand, finished 1-12 in Quad 1 games and Xavier went 1-9, but both were awarded at-large bids.
“That’s a difficult reality that we face because we can’t get the type of games that they say they’re going to reward,” Turner said. “The system is not set up as it is now for mid-majors like us to be able to get an at-large bid without exceptional circumstances.”
The Anteaters led the nation with 14 road victories and won three other games against Kennesaw State, Kent State and Towson on a neutral court at the Western Slam in Alberta, Canada over Thanksgiving weekend.
Kent State and Towson each have 22 wins and Kennesaw State has 19.
“We played a schedule that was as difficult as we could find,” Turner said. “We could not get any more better games. We have to wait until it’s 2 a.m. at the bar to get anybody to agree to play with us.”
UCI’s two nonconference losses came on the road against Oregon State and Duquesne.
Oregon State was a Quad 2 game and Duquesne was a Quad 3.
The Anteaters played two ranked teams in each of the previous two seasons, beating No. 21 Oregon two seasons ago in Eugene and No. 10 USC at the Galen Center last season, and losing one-possession games to San Diego State when the Aztecs were ranked 24th in 2022 and 25th in 2023, respectively, but UCI didn’t have a ranked team on this season’s nonconference schedule.
“The road games that we agreed to, where we get paid, we didn’t win enough of them,” Turner said. “Those are nearly impossible to win. They’re nearly impossible for us to schedule because we won some of them. It’s a tough dilemma that we face, but it’s not one that we cry about. It’s one that we embrace. We needed to win (Saturday) night, and that’s one of the reasons it hurts so deeply.”
The game was close until the final four minutes, when the Tritons outscored UCI 17-7 to earn an NCAA berth in their first year of eligibility.
Turner said it would have been an interesting situation had the Anteaters won the game and earned the conference’s lone automatic berth. The Tritons, who went 2-1 in Quad 1 games, were ranked second in last week’s College Insider.com’s Mid-Major Top 25 and UCI was ranked sixth. UCI is the only team in the top nine of that poll that is not in the NCAA field.
“I imagine they would have found a way to exclude (UCSD), which is unfortunate,” Turner said.
Turner didn’t discount the possibility that the Tritons played with more calm because they anticipated getting into the NCAA Tournament whether they won or lost on Saturday.
“Maybe it freed them up of a little pressure. I don’t know,” Turner said. “I thought my guys responded incredibly well to the pressure (Saturday) night. I thought we just wore out.”
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