They thought their season was done. Surprise NIT bid scrambles Shockers to play again
As is customary when a college basketball season ends, Wichita State conducted its exit meetings between players and coaches this past Saturday.
The Shockers had just returned home after being eliminated from the American Athletic Conference tournament the day before. With a 19-14 record and No. 134 ranking in the NET, the team-wide assumption was that the 2024-25 season was officially in the books.
Then 8:30 p.m. Sunday evening hit and a fortunate kind of chaos ensued.
Without prior notice to the team, the National Invitation Tournament selected Wichita State as one of 32 teams in its bracket and scheduled the Shockers to play at Oklahoma State — on less than 48-hour notice — with an 8 p.m. tip slated for Tuesday in Stillwater.
“I knew the info was coming out at 8:30 and I don’t know how to work Instagram, so I asked my teenage daughter to log in and let me know,” WSU head coach Paul Mills told The Eagle. “She looked and said, ‘You’re on here.’ I’m like, ‘Stop playing.’ And she was like, ‘No, dad, you’re on here.’ I’m like, ‘What? Give me that.’
“So that’s how I learned how to navigate Instagram tonight.”
But because the team believed its NIT chances were out of reach — a team official even told The Eagle earlier on Sunday that the team was “done” — and spring break officially began on Monday, a handful of players had already left Wichita following the exit meetings.
That meant Mills had to send a group text message to his players on Sunday evening to ask if there were any issues playing on Tuesday. When none were presented, the staff quickly began purchasing return travel for the players who had left.
Asked if any player might opt out of the game following their exit meeting, Mills was confident late Sunday evening that every WSU player will be in uniform for Tuesday’s game at Oklahoma State.
“I’ve got zero to worry about there,” Mills said.
The primary concern for Mills is preparing a team that was just scrambled in different cities for a game against a power-conference opponent on such short notice.
Mills’ hope is to reassemble the players in Wichita by Monday afternoon, then take a bus to Stillwater on Monday night and go through the scouting report. On Tuesday, the team will go through its typical shootaround and walk-through routine.
It is possible, if not likely, that the team, which believed its season was over this past Friday, will not be able to practice before Tuesday’s game.
“We’ll be ready,” Mills assured.
Scurrying to make the logistics work to play at least one more game together doesn’t seem to be a problem for the players. Multiple parents of players told The Eagle that while they were caught off guard by Sunday’s turn of events, their sons are excited for more Shocker basketball.
“I told (the player) to go to bed, we have some ball to play,” one parent of a player who was not in Wichita on Sunday told The Eagle.
“Everyone wants to play,” another parent said.
WSU certainly played some of its best basketball down the stretch of the season, winning eight of its final 12 games and pushing Memphis, which was just awarded a No. 5 seed in the NCAA Tournament, to the brink in Fort Worth.
The chance for WSU’s seniors to play again appealed to Mills, particularly since the trip to Stillwater is a homecoming of sorts for senior point guard Bijan Cortes, who grew up about an hour away in Kingfisher, Okla. Cortes has helped spark WSU’s late-season turnaround and he was playing the best basketball of his career in Fort Worth with 39 points and 12 assists in two games.
“I’m definitely happy to get the chance to coach these guys still,” Mills said. “I do think that some guys feel like we left a lot on the table. It’s just not often that you get a chance to course correct on something like that.
“I’ve been to two NIT’s when I was at Baylor and we lost in the championship one year and won the championship the other. It’s a really, really special feeling if you can find a way to make the most of these opportunities.”
So how did the Shockers make the NIT anyway?
There was good reason for WSU to believe an at-large bid to the NIT was a long shot, as no team outside of the top-100 in the NET made the 32-team field in 2024.
What the Shockers didn’t count on was an essential boycott of the NIT by the Power 5 conferences. Teams from the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC comprised more than half of last year’s field (17 of 32 bids), but only four P5 teams were included in Sunday’s bracket.
“The field this year almost looks like a mid-major invitational,” bracketologist Rocco Miller told The Eagle. “The last few years when the NIT was the only show in town as the next-best tournament, it was actually really hard to get in. There were teams with a top-75 NET who wouldn’t get in. It was considered a big deal for any program, especially those not in a power league and even a lot of power league teams were doing it. But now it’s almost flipped.”
It still requires some math to figure out WSU’s invitation.
A good first step is removing the teams selected for the NCAA Tournament and NIT ranked ahead of WSU in the NET, which leaves a total of 46 teams.
Of that group, it’s safe to scratch off 34 of them as declined bids from P5 teams. Some P5 teams outright said no to NIT bids, like Wake Forest, LSU, South Carolina and Pittsburgh. Others will receive a spot in the inaugural Crown Basketball Tournament, a 16-team event hosted in Las Vegas and sponsored by FOX Sports that has apparently won over the attention of the power conferences.
Four more can be crossed off, as Boise State and Oregon State reportedly are holding out for a Crown spot, while Nevada and UNLV declined a NIT bid.
Of the eight remaining contenders for an NIT at-large spot, WSU ranks squarely in the middle of the pack when examining “KNIT” — a catch-all metric that averages a team’s ranking in the six metrics tracked on each NET team sheet (KPI, Strength of Record, Wins Above Bubble, ESPN BPI, KenPom and Bart Torvik). The Shockers (135.2) have a better average than South Alabama (136.5), Illinois State (139.2), South Dakota State (144.7), Wofford (151.8) but a worse average than George Washington (121.0), Belmont (124.5), Cornell (128.2) and Louisiana Tech (131.7).
So how did WSU jump the line?
Miller, the bracketologist, suspects its conference affiliation may have had something to do with it.
“It’s possible that the NIT has some sort of deal with conferences,” Miller said. “It’s possible each of those next-best leagues have a certain amount of slots and that’s how Wichita State got in.”
North Texas, UAB and Florida Atlantic were the three-highest ranked teams in the NET, followed by WSU. Even though Tulane (150.8), East Carolina (169.0) and Temple (167.8) all finished ahead of WSU in the conference standings, their KNIT scores were well behind WSU, giving the Shockers the coveted fifth slot in the American.
Mills even mentioned that as what gave him a sliver of hope on Sunday evening.
“You’re sitting there at 134 in the NET, is that really good enough to get into the NIT?” Mills said. “But then you look at it and they took three (AAC teams) last year. So I knew if they took four teams this year, then we would have a chance.”
And that’s the math behind how the Shockers earned a surprise bid to the NIT.
This story was originally published March 17, 2025 at 6:02 AM.
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