It all could have been avoided if Fox and the NCAA had managed to work together.
It was first reported in September of 2023 that Fox was looking to create a new college basketball postseason tournament for teams in the three conferences that it has rights to: the Big Ten, Big 12, and Big East. The proposed tournament would have 16 teams and be played entirely in Las Vegas, and would effectively deprive the venerable NCAA-owned NIT of teams from those conferences. In response to the prospect of the new tournament, and with NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt acknowledging that “the very viability of the [NIT] could be in jeopardy”, the NCAA announced a series of sweeping changes to the NIT selection process, eliminating the automatic bids previously given to regular-season conference champions left out of the NCAA tournament and replacing them with a minimum two teams from each of the then-six major conferences with each of them guaranteed to host a game, which stood to greatly increase the number of spots going to power-conference teams at the expense of mid- and low-majors. Nonetheless, Fox and Anschutz Entertainment Group announced the launch of the College Basketball Crown that April with the first tournament to be held the following year, with a minimum of two teams from each of the three conferences Fox has the rights to and the remaining ten teams being chosen at-large.
After the first year, Fox and AEG announced they had “streamlined” the tournament by cutting it from 16 teams to eight, the likely reason for which was probably apparent when one looked at the inaugural bracket and saw three to five (depending on how you count Washington State and Oregon State) mid-majors included, including Boise State, which was actually the only team in the main NCAA tournament’s “First Four Out” to appear in any postseason tournament despite the other three coming from the Big 12 and Big Ten. Both years, though, the impact of the new tournament on the NIT has been evident and stark. In each of the last two years, only four out of 32 teams in the NIT have come from major conferences, including, oddly enough, Oklahoma State out of the Big 12 both years. Despite being entitled to two automatic bids, the SEC sent no teams to the NIT in 2025 and only one in 2026, though Auburn ended up winning the whole thing. But 2026 also saw perhaps the ultimate statement of the CBC’s triumph over the NIT: rather than going to mid-majors or the conferences that were contracted to it, the CBC’s two at-larges went to one team from the ACC and one from the SEC. The CBC had as many SEC teams as the NIT did, and they picked Oklahoma, who had beaten out Auburn as the first team out of the NCAA Tournament. After just two years, it was apparent that even for the teams that nominally should have been on the side of the NIT, the CBC had established itself as the more prestigious tournament, reducing the NIT to the status the CBI (seemingly fully killed by all this) once had: a third-tier tournament primarily for mid-majors.