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NIT Championships are not National Championships
The Helms Athletic Foundation retroactively selected the NIT champion as its national champion for 1938 (Temple), and chose the NIT champion over the NCAA champion once, in 1939 (Long Island). More recently, the mathematically based Premo-Poretta Power Poll published in the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia retroactively ranked teams for each season prior to 1949, with the NIT champion finishing ahead of the NCAA champion in 1939 and 1941. Between 1939 and 1950, when teams could compete in both tournaments, only DePaul (1945), Utah (1947), and San Francisco (1949) claim or celebrate national championships for their teams based solely on an NIT championship,   although Long Island recognizes its selection as the 1939 national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation.

In 1950, the NCAA ruled that no team could compete in both tournaments, in effect indicating that if a team were eligible for the NCAA tournament, it had better play in it. Since then, the NCAA tournament has clearly been the major one, with conference champions and the majority of the top-ranked teams participating in it. Not until 1951, when the NCAA expanded to 16 teams, did the numbers of unique teams in the two annual tournaments exceed 19.