NEW YORK -- Ohio State, which was ranked No. 1 entering the NCAA Tournament and went on to lose to Florida in the title game, will be one of the four early round hosts for the NIT Season Tip-Off.
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Syracuse, Washington and Texas A&M will be the other first- and second-round sites for the 16-team tournament, it was announced Thursday.
Ohio State, which has to replace freshmen Greg Oden, Mike Conley and Daequan Cook, who were all first-round NBA Draft picks, will play Wisconsin-Green Bay on Nov. 12, with Columbia playing Delaware State in the other game. The second round will be Nov. 13.
Also on Nov. 12-13 at Syracuse, Siena will face the host school while Saint Joseph's faces Fairleigh Dickinson.
The other early rounds will be Nov. 13-14.
New Jersey Tech will be at Washington with Utah playing High Point in the other game, while Oral Roberts is at Texas A&M with Texas-El Paso playing Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in the other game.
The semifinals and finals will be at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 21 and 23.
Beside Ohio State, Texas A&M, which reached the third round, and Oral Roberts and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, both first-round losers, played in the 2007 NCAA Tournament.
Butler beat Notre Dame, Indiana, Tennessee and Gonzaga in winning last year's NIT Season Tip-Off. The quick start moved the Bulldogs into the Top 25 and they stayed there the rest of the season and lost to Florida in the third round of the NCAA Tournament.
Former South Carolina coach Eddie Fogler joined the NIT selection committee, replacing Dean Smith, who had been on it since it began in 2005.
The rest of the group that selects and brackets the field for the preseason and postseason versions of the NIT remained the same: chairman C.M. Newton, Rudy Davalos, Don DeVoe, Gene Keady, Reggie Minton, Jack Powers and Carroll Williams.
The postseason tournament started in 1938, while the preseason version began in 1985.
