So your team just won the NIT. Does that mean you’ll make the NCAA Tournament next season?

It’s March Madness once more, and while 68 teams will get a shot at a berth in the Final Four and a possible national title, the NCAA Tournament isn’t the only postseason tournament around. The National Invitational Tournament (or NIT) has a storied history in college football’s postseason, and your team is probably in it if it just missed out on the NCAA tourney.

But what happens if you win the second-tier tournament? Is that a sign of better things to come, such as a trip to the actual Big Dance?

Not always, but kinda, at least under the modern format of the tournament.

Since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985, only three NIT champs have made it to the tourney’s second weekend, and none has advanced past the Sweet 16. In the last decade, an NIT championship hasn’t tied closely to a team’s NCAA Tournament hopes.

For the even lesser tournaments, the following year’s results are — predictably — much less predictive.

You might expect the winners of the lesser Collegeinsider.com Tournament and College Basketball Invitational to have even weaker N.C.A.A. tournament performances.

Just one of six C.I.T. winners, Old Dominion in 2010, made the N.C.A.A. the next year. And only two of seven C.B.I. winners did.

But one of those C.B.I. teams actually wins the prize for best performance in the N.C.A.A. by a smaller tournament titlist in the last 20 years.

In fact, the NCAA Tournament didn’t even begin until a year after the NIT did.

In the early days, the Big Dance was actually pretty small, with only eight teams participating and only one getting in from each region. That meant that the NIT could have pick of the litter from everyone left, and oftentimes teams would be invited to both and turn the NCAA tournament down.

In 1968, the NIT expanded to 16 teams, and would expand to 32 by 1980. But by then, it was entrenched as the second-tier competition. The NCAA now actually owns and operates the NIT, which it purchased in 2010.

While it’s still a competition and something to play for, it doesn’t have the incentives that other second-tier competitions do. For instance, in European soccer, the UEFA Europa League champion gets an automatic berth in the incredibly lucrative UEFA Champions League during the following season. It entices team to actually try to put all their efforts into winning that competition.

On a fiscal front, there’s a slight boon for the schools that host the first two rounds on-campus, but finances for the NIT aren’t released by the NCAA, so it’s tough to truly gauge exactly how the revenue for the tournament is disbursed, and how much participating schools earn.

There’s at least some evidence to suggest that a team that wins the NIT is on the ascendancy and could take the next step in the following season with a berth into the NCAA Tournament. So if your team’s in the NIT, all is not lost.