Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
The Wright State Raiders will not be returning to the NCAA tournament this year, but the season isn’t over for coach Scott Nagy’s team, either.
The Raiders, who lost 77-66 to Northern Kentucky in the Horizon League tournament championship game Tuesday night, are guaranteed a bid to the NIT because they were the No. 1 seed in their conference tournament.
Here are five things to know about the Raider men and their future:
1. The Raiders’ appearance in the NIT will be their first.
Wright State missed an opportunity to make back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances for the first time in school history, but the Raiders can still make some program history.
Despite posting 11 winning seasons in the last 13 years, they have never been to the NIT, which was once a more prestigious tournament than the NCAA’s version.
2. Where to next?
Dratings.com projects the Raiders to receive a No. 7 seed in the NIT, though the NIT bracketology is more volatile than the NCAA tournament version because of automatic bids for regular season champions who are upset in their conference tournament.
3. The NIT field could be fairly fascinating from a local standpoint.
Wright State is highly unlikely to be the only team from Southwest Ohio in the 2019 NIT.
4. “If it doesn’t hurt, something’s wrong.”
Nagy was disappointed his team couldn’t do much to slow down the Norse in the Horizon League tournament final, but he put the season in perspective afterward.
“Everybody has sat up here and said oh we faced the adversity but what our guys did, I’m really proud of ‘em,” Nagy said. “It just goes without saying. At one point we were 8-10 and 2-3 in the league and we won the league, so I love the effort our guys gave us.
“I told them today honestly just how much I admire ‘em for how hard they played this year. It’s been an incredible thing for me to watch to the point where as a coach it almost brings me to tears because they’ve just given us everything we’ve asked of them. Sometimes it’s not enough, but it’s OK for it to hurt. That’s OK, it should hurt. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong.”
5. See you next year?
The budding WSU-NKU rivalry probably won’t cool down soon.
