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https://www.ozy.com/the-huddle/the-nit-was-awesome-until-the-ncaa-ruined-basketball/83025
“It was a national championship,” confirms Doug Bruno, current head coach of the DePaul women’s team who also played under Meyer from 1968 to 1973. “It was Madison Square Garden. It was the mecca of college basketball. It’s what everyone had their eyes on. The NCAA — yes, they had a tournament, but it was really an afterthought tournament at that point.”
“In those years, the NIT was a more prestigious tournament than the NCAA,” Meyer wrote in his autobiography Coach. “It was played in New York, while the NCAA was played on scattered campuses in smaller towns. The schools took home thousands of dollars as their share of the gate receipts for playing in Madison Square Garden. In the NCAA eliminations, they were lucky to make expenses. So the NIT meant a lot more to a struggling private school like DePaul.”
“I think you have to consider them both national championships,” Bruno says. “But at the same time, the NIT was the premiere tournament. You talk to anybody who was around college basketball in the ’30s and ’40s, and they’ll all tell you that the NIT was the bigger of the two championships.”
All that I wrote were facts, 2 opinions from the same private school are not facts. The NCAA tourney began in 1939. The 11 years that Bruno and Meyer wrote about, I furnished some facts that would dispute that. But, clearly, IUs NCAA championship in 1940, are supported by facts as being the legit National Champ. 1953 is also indisputable.