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[ShockTalk]

It also is showing up this year already in Lunardi's bracket projections.

He is currently giving the WCC two bids (Gonzaga and St. Mary's) even though the WCC is the #14 ranked conference.

It is pretty wild that the #14 rpi conference can get an at large but the #7 conference last year got one.

Lundardi's projections also show that the Valley as bad as it is this year, could get 2 teams into the dance if there was separation between the top and bottom (based on the current #14 conference, getting an at large in his current projections).

Would you agree that last year that was pretty decent separation between UNI and WSU, from the rest of the pack? UNI won the conference and the tourney, but we were very clearly number two in both and split with them. I think the separation theory makes sense to a degree, but last year was a counter-example.

Not really. Yes, there was only a 3 game separation from 1st to 4th place in the MWC, but there was also a 4 game separation from 3rd/4th to 5th place. In the Valley, 2nd place WSU didn't separate itself from the pack being only 3 games ahead of 6th place. Both of the MWC 3rd/4th teams had a one game better record overall and in their conference than WSU, both were in the finals of their conference tourney with the loser having a win over a BCS top 20 team. Also the loser in the finals had no bad conference loses. WSU had two. Had WSU not had those two bad loses, they would have been 14-4 in conference, only one game behind UNI and 3 games ahead of 3rd place and dancin'.

[proshox]

The was only one MVC team because the second place team in the league (WSU) had too many bad losses and no big wins other a home game against UNI. The conference RPI proved that there were a whole bunch of average teams, but it couldn't cover up for the fact that there was only one top thirty team...