It’s March. Have you filled out your brackets yet?

While the NCAA’s Division 1 Tournament garners most of the attention (and with Cinderella stories like George Mason’s 2006 run, there’s a reason), another large Division I college basketball tournament is underway.

The National Invitation Tournament, despite pejorative nicknames such as the “Not Invited Tournament”, is an interesting case study in the setup and execution of a single elimination tournament. How big should a single elimination tournament get? Are multiple play-in rounds helpful or degrading? How should at-large bids be decided and seeded? The NIT has wrestled with each of these questions, and has come up with a tournament process, for better or worse.

As of 2007, the NIT is a single-elimination tournament, made up of four brackets with eight teams each, but this has not always been the case. Between 2002 and 2006, an eight team play-in round was introduced to determine who would earn the four eighth-seeds. This round has been eliminated; after all, who wants to play a round where victory rewards you with losing to a number one seed? March Sadness, indeed.

Seeding is determined through a combination of automatic bids and at-large bids. But before the NCAA bought the rights to the NIT in 2005, the at-large bid process was plagued by charges of corruption. ESPN, which televised the tournament, held contractual rights to select the teams accepted into the NIT, and schools in large television markets (such as the University of New Mexico) would consistently earn bids. To ensure the tournament has integrity, this clause was eliminated, and seeding is determined by a committee of former NCAA coaches, transparently.

So check out the “Little Dance” this year. Maybe next year you can start an NIT pool.