Yale at Murray State, Thursday April 3, 7:00 PM Eastern, CBS Sports Network
It is finally here. The Championship. The final game. One game to decide who gets to hang the banner be forever remembered as the team that won it all in 2014. Well, who won the 2014 CIT at least.
Thursday night, the Ivy League’s Yale Bulldogs travel to the CFSB Center in Murray, Kentucky to take on the Ohio Valley Conference’s Murray State Racers for the championship of the 2014 CollegeInsiders.com Tournament. Yale is 19-13 on the season entering tonight’s game while Murray State holds a 22-11 record. All told, Yale has had a much tougher road to this title game, and it remains to be seen whether they have enough left for one more road win.
Yale opened the CIT with a one point home win over Quinnipiac, and followed that up with three straight road victories, at Holy Cross, at Columbia, and at VMI. Murray State, on the other hand, has only had to travel out on the road once in the entire tournament. The Racers opened the CIT with a three point road victory at Missouri State. They have been able to stay home since then, winning by double digits over Nebraska-Omaha, Towson, and Pacific. Clearly, the Racers are the favorites tonight to keep up their home-court wining streak (in fact they only lost one home game all season, and that was back in late November to Middle Tennessee).
The winner of this game will be the 2014 CIT champions. They will join Old Dominion (2009), Missouri State (2010), Santa Clara (2011), Mercer (2012), and East Carolina (2013) as the only teams to have CIT championship banners hanging at their home courts. And in the end, while both Yale and Murray State came up short in their attempts to earn an NCAA tournament bid this season, there will be a question that will remain unanswered. Is a season more of a success if a team earns an NCAA bid just to be eliminated in the first round of the Big Dance, or is it more of a success if it ends with a victory in a national tournament, such as the NIT, CBI or CIT? Either Yale or Murray State will be able to claim the later at the conclusion of this game.