SALT LAKE CITY — No matter the spin, this much is true for college basketball: A deep run in the NIT, even to the point of winning the championship, is never better than making the NCAA tournament.

After beating Creighton, having qualified for the NIT final four in New York, the BYU Cougars still did not achieve their first priority. With a program of BYU’s stature, the goal every year is to make the NCAA tournament and anything less is a disappointment.

As the modified saying goes, no amount of success in the NIT or any other lesser tournament can compensate for failure to play in the field of 68. Better to be one-and-done in the Big Dance than to play the maximum number of games in the secondary tournament.

The NIT has gone the way of the college football postseason, which is littered with a host of lesser bowl games that draw precious little attention save for the fans and media of each school involved. In the end, these bowls mean nothing more than a chance to play another game, even if it’s trumped up and concludes with a trophy that eventually collects dust on display in some case.

This isn’t to say an NIT championship or winning several games in the tournament is not a noteworthy accomplishment. Any victory over decent competition is good.

And don’t buy the argument that the NIT winner is the 69th best Division I team. The NIT annually includes quality competition, teams that are often superior to several that enjoy automatic NCAA berths by virtue of winning their conference tournaments.

Obviously, BYU is better than Austin Peay, which was only 7-9 in the Ohio Valley Conference but got hot and won the conference tournament. Having earned the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament as a No. 16 seed, Austin Peay lost by 26 points to top-seeded Kansas.

Spin masters of the NIT, who are usually fans and broadcasters of the teams in the tournament, normally like to believe that success in it can serve as a springboard for the following season. The evidence, however, does not often back up such an assertion.

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Seljaas assists ailing Collinsworth, leads BYU to NIT semifinals in NYC

With ailing star Kyle Collinsworth on the bench with the flu, the BYU men’s basketball team needed a new leader to step up in its National Invitation Tournament quarterfinal Tuesday night in the Marriott Center.

Last year’s winner, Stanford, recently finished a .500 season that resulted in Johnny Dawkins getting fired as head coach. Going back to 2005, South Carolina won the NIT only to follow it up with a second consecutive championship. Several NIT winners since then either didn’t make the NCAA tournament or played only one game the next season.

But two NIT winners, West Virginia in 2009 and Baylor in 2013, did go on to reach the NCAA Sweet 16 the following seasons. The problem is, much more than most teams, BYU usually has significant changeover each season and is likely the reason the program has only two Sweet 16 appearances over the last 35 years.

After playing in Madison Square Garden, BYU will lose seniors Kyle Collinsworth, Chase Fischer and Nate Austin in addition to outgoing missionary Zac Seljaas. Three missionaries — TJ Haws, Eric Mika and Payton Dastrup — will join the program, creating an entirely new identity.

“We can make this season special with an NIT championship,” said coach Dave Rose.

In the grand scheme, perhaps the best thing about success in the NIT is the chance to play more games, in particular for the seniors. In the case of BYU’s seniors, they walked off the Marriott Center floor one last time as winners before an adoring crowd.

“Good for the seniors to get a positive feeling about their experience here and everybody leaves here on a real positive note,” Rose said.

And, in the long run, that’s good enough.

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