NIT, D-2, D-3 finals join 2026 Indy Final 4

• Myron Medcalf, ESPN

  • Personnel WriterJul 11, 2024, 10:33 AM ET Close Covers college basketball Signed up with ESPN.com in 2011
  • Graduate of Minnesota State University, Mankato

The NCAA will host a guys’s college basketball soiree in 2026 that will include numerous title games in the same city, the association announced Thursday.Indianapolis, the host of the

2026 Last Four, will also host the Department II and Department III nationwide title games along with the semifinals and finals of the NIT. It’s the second time the NCAA has staged all 3 championship game games in the exact same city(Atlanta, 2013). The NIT semifinals will be played at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, and the title game will be held at another unannounced place. The Division II and Division III national title games in guys’s basketball will be played at Gainbridge Fieldhouse one day before the Division I national championship, which will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium.Editor’s Picks”This will be an incredible event of guys’s college basketball across all 3 divisions in Indy,” Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice

president of basketball, stated in a statement.”When we did this in 2013, we had nearly 8,000 fans watching the Divisions II and III national championship, and the last two nights of this year’s NIT at Hinkle Fieldhouse included sold-out crowds of more than 9,000 fans. It will be an awesome opportunity for student-athletes at the getting involved schools, as well as a display for the legendary college basketball fans in Indiana. “The NCAA likewise revealed Thursday that it will consider brand-new analytics tools as the selection committee selects the 37 at-large groups to include in the 2024-25 tournament field. Both Bart Torvik’s rankings and the Wins Versus Bubble metric– an evaluation of a team’s performance against its schedule compared to the average bubble group (think baseball’s WAR stat)– will be featured in the assessment process.” The committee has actually constantly valued different data points and metrics to help with their assessment procedure, and these two metrics have actually increasingly been referenced by members recently,”Gavitt said.” Adding them to the group sheet guarantees that all 12 members easily have access to this information. The Torvik rankings, together with BPI and KenPom, provides the committee 3 predictive ratings, while the WAB, Strength of Record and KPI provides three results-based metrics, all of which, in addition to the web, will be helpful to the team evaluation process.”