Michigan basketball a 3 seed in NIT, to open tournament at home vs. Toledo
Editor's note: This story has been updated. The original NIT pairings listed Michigan as the No. 2 seed and Vanderbilt as the No. 3 seed in their quarter of the bracket. The NCAA has since corrected its mistake, listing U-M as a 3 seed and Vanderbilt as the 2.
Michigan basketball knows its potential path to a postseason championship.
It just isn't in the tournament it had envisioned prior to the start of the 2022-23 season.
U-M (17-15, 11-9 Big Ten) was named a 3-seed in the NIT during a selection show on Sunday evening and will face Toledo at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Crisler Center. The game will be on ESPN2.
Toledo (27-7) won the Mid-American Conference regular season title, but lost to Kent State in the tournament championship game for the automatic bid to the NCAA tournament
"It’s not our ultimate goal," Michigan center Hunter Dickinson said on a livestream of "Roundball Podcast." "But we’re going to try to make the Michigan fans as proud as possible at this point."
Unlike the NCAA tournament, which is played exclusively at neutral sites, the higher seeded team hosts home games in each of the opening three rounds of the NIT — U-M was 12-4 in 16 home games this season.
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The NIT semifinals, typically held at Madison Square Garden, has been moved to Orleans Arena in Las Vegas on March 28 (ESPN) with the championship game on March 30 (ESPN2).
This is the first time the Wolverines have missed the NCAA tournament under coach Juwan Howard; the last occasion came in 2015, though the Wolverines were passed over for an NIT bid that season.
Should Michigan win its opening round matchup, it would set up a second-round matchup either at Vanderbilt or hosting Yale. A win there would likely send U-M to No. 1-seed Clemson.
The other top seeds in the 32-team tournament are Oklahoma State, Rutgers and Oregon.
Michigan has won the NIT three times (1984, 1997 and 2004), the most recent coming when Daniel Horton scored 14 points and Dion Harris scored 13 in a 62-55 win over Rutgers in 2004. U-M's 1997 tournament title was vacated with self-imposed sanctions.
This season, Michigan has nobody but itself to blame for missing the NCAA tournament for just the second time since 2010. U-M went 3-12 in 15 Quad I games, 4-12 in 16 "close" games and lost its final three games of the season after working its way back onto the bubble with a 6-2 record in the month of February.
In the immediate aftermath of U-M's loss in the Big Ten tournament to Rutgers, it was unclear if the team would accept a bid to the NIT. Hunter Dickinson said the team needed to talk about it when it got back to Ann Arbor.
Howard said as much, but said the team wasn't ready for its season to be over.
“Yes, they want to continue to keep playing,” Howard said Thursday in Chicago. “I want to see them playing, and I want to be out there coaching them in the postseason. We'll go back home. We'll talk about what's the plan for the future, and we'll go from there.”
North Carolina, which was projected to be a 1-seed, announced Sunday evening it was opting out of the NIT.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan basketball a 3 seed in NIT, to host Toledo in opener
