At the end, the last 10 or 20 at large teams are all not good enough in some or many ways. They have all proven they can lose to good teams and bad teams. They play schedules that are pretty much incomparable outside of conferences, and the metrics used are at best questionable (how can a metric that says that we were close to being a top 50 team when we were 10-10 and 2-7 in conference be used for anything).

So yes, the selection is biased. Yes, backroom deals, conference prejudices (if you watched Indiana last night you saw how bad they didn't belong, and they beat Michigan in the big10 tournament, so there are 2 right there). But, in the end, there was a pool of about 20 teams that didn't belong (and we were part of that until we won our way in) that needed to fill 10 spots. But don't forget, every one of them had proven over the previous 4 months that they were really not good enough in many, many ways. So they picked 10 of the 20, leaving 10 to go play in the NIT. Sucks if you are one of the 10, but someone has to be and in the end, all did just enough to be in that pool to begin with, but not enough to be good enough to not be in it.