Congratulations to the New Mexico Lobos men's basketball team for qualifying for NIT Tournament play!
By Geoff Grammer - The Albuquerque Journal
It ain’t the NCAA Tournament, but the Lobos get to slip on their dancing shoes at least one more time in the Pit after all.
The Lobos earned a No. 2 seed and will host Utah Valley on Wednesday night at 8 p.m. in the Pit in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament — the 32-team event that was announced late Sunday following the sport’s main event 68-team NCAA Tournament field was announced. The game will be streamed online on ESPN-plus.
The invitation ends a nine-year hiatus from postseason play — the longest such drought in the nearly 60-year modern era of Lobos basketball (the Pit era) — for a program that two years ago beat just four Division I teams and finished 303 in the NET rankings.
Utah Valley finished 25-8 this season and was an automatic qualifier into the NIT field as the regular season champion of the Western Athletic Conference. Coached by former Stanford star and NBA player Mark Madsen, the Wolverines from Orem, Utah, lost in Friday’s semifinal round of the WAC Tournament to Southern Utah, a team UNM beat in the Nov. 7 season opener.This season, the Lobos finished 22-11 (the first time reaching 20 wins since 2014), had a NET ranking of 52 and saw its average home attendance rise by more than 30 percent over last season.
The Lobos this season went 5-6 against teams playing in the NCAA Tournament, but faltered down the stretch and lost Thursday in the quarterfinals of the Mountain West Tournament to Utah State, one of four teams the league sent to the Big Dance.
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