NIT bracket 2016: Monmouth and South Carolina in field, but no Ben Simmons

The complete field for this year's National Invitation Tournament is set, ahead of the NIT's March 15 tipoff. The tournament's full bracket is right here, headlined by No. 1 seeds Monmouth, St. Bonaventure, South Carolina and Valparaiso. It's also notable for what it doesn't include, as LSU and five-star freshman Ben Simmons will not participate.

Here's the bracket, in four quadrants:

The NIT bracket is populated by teams that won their regular season conference titles but failed to lift their conference championship trophies and fell short of a NCAA Tournament at-large bid. This season, 18 clubs met those criteria, including Hofstra, Valpo, Bucknell and Akron. The rest of the teams in the NIT are picked at-large, and some teams, like LSU, decide not to participate in tournaments other than the Big Dance.

The NIT field comprises 32 teams distributed into four regions of eight teams each. The host sites for all tournament games except the semifinals and championship game are at the higher-seeded team's campus arenas. The semis and finals go down in Madison Square Garden on March 29 and 31, respectively.