Texas State Men's Basketball to Participate in Preseason NIT

According to a story on foxsports.com, the Texas State men's basketball team will be participating in the Preseason National Invitational Tournament, or NIT this fall. Four schools have been chosen to host the opening rounds of the tournament at on-campus sites: Duke University, the University of Connecticut, Louisiana State University and Arizona State University. The Bobcats will travel to Arizona State along with the TCU Horned Frogs and Cal State Northridge Matadors. The matchups and dates of the opening rounds are still to be determined, but if Texas State were to move on from Tempe they would play in Madison Square Garden in New York City on November 25.

This will not be an easy field for Texas State to handle, as both Cal State Northridge and Arizona State made the NCAA tournament last year. CSU-Northridge won the Big West Conference, and entered the field of 64 with a 15 seed. They then put a scare into second-seeded 2008 NCAA runner-up Memphis, leading by 6 with only 10 minutes left in regulation. However, three of the starters on the Matadors' squad for that game have been lost to graduation.

The Sun Devils of Arizona State entered the tournament as a 6 seed, and advanced to the second round with a win over Temple before getting bounced by Syracuse. ASU did, however, lose their two leading scorers in James Harden and Jeff Pendergraph to the NBA draft. It's hard to say how good Arizona State will be after finishing 3rd in an always tough Pac-10 last year, but it's safe to say that this should be by far Texas State's toughest game on the road to New York.

TCU is coming off of a tough 14-17 season where they went 5-11 in a relatively deep Mountain West Conference. However, they were able to go 2-1 against Big 12 foes with wins over Colorado and Texas Tech while dropping a decision at home against Nebraska. Additionally, TCU went 2-0 against Southland foes last year with wins over Texas A&M - Corpus Christi and McNeese State. The Horned Frogs bring back 3 of their 4 top scorers but lose their top scorer in Kevin Langford, who averaged 13.0 ppg. This should be the easiest matchup for the Bobcats in the tournament if they do end up playing their purple-clad neighbors from Fort Worth, but it's still far from a guaranteed win.

The full line-up of the preseason NIT is as follows:

ASU: TCU, Cal State Northridge, Texas State
UConn: Hofstra, Yale, Colgate
LSU: Western Kentucky, Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Duke: Charlotte, Elon, Coastal Carolina

There is still no official word from the Texas State Athletic Department about the rest of the 2009-2010 basketball schedule. The Bobcats will be looking to improve their standing amongst the Southland this year after a 14-16 season that saw Texas State's first appearance in the Southland Conference postseason tournament in three years.

-Will Butler, KTSW Sports Director/Blog Editor