INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -Setting the 40-team National Invitation Tournament field was a little more complicated than assigning dates and sites for the NCAA rejects.

For the first time, thanks to a change in the tournament structure, the NIT selection committee seeded all 40 teams and placed them in brackets to assure as much balance as possible, committee chairman C.M. Newton said Monday.

The NIT semifinals and finals will be in Madison Square Garden in New York on March 28 and March 30.

``What we want to have is a true basketball event, a real tournament, one where there's no preconceived ideas of who gets to New York,'' Newton said. ``We'd love to have great crowds, but this is not a financial consideration. We want good television coverage, but were not going to play this thing for television and move games around.''

The NIT, which includes six teams that won regular-season championships but lost in their conference tournaments, will begin Tuesday night with an opening round at eight campus sites. The four No. 1 seeds - Michigan, Maryland, Louisville and Cincinnati - are among the 24 teams that will start with first-round games Wednesday through Saturday.

Newton, a former coach at Alabama and Vanderbilt and athletic director at Kentucky, also served on the NCAA selection committee for seven years. He said picking the NIT teams was ``every bit as tough.''

``Basically, what we did, six old coaches, we got together and said, 'How can we make this the best dadgummed basketball event that we can make it, where every team will have a fair shot at it?''' Newton said.

The six former coaches - Newton, Dean Smith, Don DeVoe, Reggie Minton, John Powers and Carroll Williams - split the 31 Division I conferences among them and spent weeks gathering information and watching games. They had a preliminary list of about 85 teams, pared that number through a series of conference calls and then met Sunday night after the NCAA selected its field of 65 teams.

About three hours later, they had their lineup.

``Once the teams were selected, it was very difficult to seed them,'' Newton said. ``But we went through that process and then voted on all of them.

``We balanced the regions, though, which was critical. You can question whether Louisville or Missouri State should be a No. 1 seed, but I don't think you can question (that) there's very good team balance throughout the regions.''

Louisville will play the winner of the opening-round game between Northern Arizona and Delaware State; Cincinnati will play either Charlotte or Georgia Southern; Maryland will face either Manhattan or Fairleigh Dickinson; and Michigan will play either UTEP or Lipscomb.

Missouri State and Creighton, both members of the Missouri Valley Conference, were among the four No. 2 seeds. Missouri State will play either Stanford or Virginia, while Creighton will play the Temple-Akron winner. The other No. 2 seeds are Florida State, which and will play the Miami (Ohio)-Butler winner; and Saint Joseph's, which is in Maryland's bracket and will play either Penn State or Rutgers.

The No. 3 seeds are Hofstra, Houston, South Carolina and the University of Miami.

``We're quite pleased with the strength of the NIT field,'' Newton said.

With two exceptions - Butler and Notre Dame - the team with the better seed will play at home through the early rounds. The two Indiana teams were spared initial games on the road because of conflicting events at their opponents' gyms. The normal seeding would determine the home teams should Butler beat Miami or Notre Dame advance against Vanderbilt.

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