ESPN Men's Basketball

Our legal system is a marvelous thing. Best in the world, no question.

Especially if you have cataracts and like a stiff belt of antifreeze every now and then.

Take the NCAA and the NIT, for example. The NIT (or National Invitation Tournament) sued the NCAA (or Need to Consume All Alternatives) for trying to run the NIT out of business with an eye toward having a monopoly on all college basketball, wherever it may rear its ugly head.

But now, the two sides have settled, with the NCAA buying the NIT and taking over both of its tournaments.

In other words, the NCAA got the NIT to agree to the very thing it went to court to prevent, in exchange for a healthy chunk of the NCAA's petty cash drawer ($57 million worth).

Which is fine, as far as it goes. If the NIT people are happy being eaten for the right amount of walking money, then let freedom ring.

And we'll leave the details about what the NCAA plans to do with the NIT to others. They could adjust the Preseason NIT any way they like, and they could take the 40 teams from the Postseason NIT and dump them into the NCAA Tournament, or take them and another 23 teams and expand the NCAA to a bracket-evening 128 teams.

Or they could slap a fez on it, call it the Ottoman Empire, and blow it to smithereens. Sort of an alternate ending to the old song about why Constantinople got the works, or something like that.

But the central truth remains, which is that yet again, the NCAA got what it wanted by virtue of its sheer mass and throw weight. They have been nearly the only place to go for college sports for awhile now, and the NIT was one of the very last shards of glass in the oatmeal.

Now, apparently, it is gone, and the NCAA stands alone, legs apart, hands on hips, laughing Barry White style like the bald pituitary freak on the label of the vegetable cans. All-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful.

Which, frankly, is sort of scary.

The problem, you see, with the NIT wasn't that it was there, but that it wasn't strong enough. It had long ago become an afterthought in the basketball firmament, as the NCAA expanded from 16 to 25 to 32 to 40 to 48 to 53 to 64 and now to 65 teams. The only thing keeping the NIT from turning into an intramural league was the fact that TV (ESPN, that is) has an insatiable need for programming.

But now even the intramural option has been taken from them, simply because the NCAA must be fed, and has the range and the utensils to reach across the table.

Somewhere, Bob Knight must be retching in his bushes.

Not that Knight hurling in the front yard is a deal-breaker, necessarily, but he was one of the last believers in the concept, if not the execution (no pun intended) of the NIT. The NIT, ultimately, served the single purpose of reminding us the NCAA didn't used to be the only item on the menu.

But now it is, for all intent and purpose, able to do what every monopoly does -- whatever the hell it wants, to whomever the hell it wants, whenever the hell it wants. And even if the NIT has shrunk to the size of a snow pea in significance, the idea that the NCAA could be sued for monopolistic practices and then get the plaintiff to settle because of those very monopolistic practices is, well, creepy.

And no, we don't want to hear from any lawyers out there explaining why this is entirely legal and part of the laws of capitalism and why it is simply the way of the world and anyway, no we do not remember who won the NIT last year so what are we whining about. If we wanted you to scold us intemperately, we'd have married you.

Fact is, it's lousy when the biggest guy gets to buy his way out of trouble and into an even better situation, just because it does. The NCAA is a grim little army, humorless and inflexible and bullying while churning up money for itself and its member schools (while being completely bereft of funds to pay the athletes who do its daily work), and it should be taught humility rather than be rewarded for hubris born of hugeness.

In other words, the NIT should have lived just because, and that's a good enough reason on its own.

But it didn't, and life, such as it is, goes on. The NCAA wipes the gravy off its chin and moves on to the next meal.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com