Bob Cook

Missouri Valley Conference commissioner Doug Elgin is getting a reputation as college basketball’s Billy Beane — so much so, Joe Morgan is expected to emphatically declare he has not read the book Elgin wrote about himself.

For now, the ones complaining about Elgin and his Moneyball-goes-to-college strategy are the other conferences and coaches whose teams are being squeezed out in favor of the possible six teams the MVC could send to the NCAA tournament. It’s the culmination of Elgin’s six-year effort to have his small-forward-sized mid-major conference challenge and beat the big trees of college basketball. The 10-member MVC has had multiple NCAA tournament bids 11 out of the previous 13 seasons, but in that time it’s never had more than three.

This year, it got four.

Like Beane, Elgin focuses on key statistics he believes will maximize his relatively underfunded organization’s postseason opportunities — the most key being the Ratings Percentage Index, the NCAA’s ranking of teams based not just on wins, but where they happened and who they were against. The MVC tournament contenders’ RPI ranges from 21 to 42, all spots from which at-large teams have qualified.

And like Beane, Elgin is getting some criticism over how he does things.

In particular, it’s coming from competitors who believe his plan is working too well, that somehow he’s outfoxed the system. A March 5 Washington Post story featuring much carping from coaches in other conferences was headlined, “The Numbers, Gamed?”

Elgin has advised conference members since 2000 on scheduling and other issues that could affect their ratings, but he was a little touchy with the Post about charges he’s somehow cracked the mystery tournament-entry code: “[The] notion that we have somehow outsmarted the system is a bunch of crap.”

Elgin’s big secret to the MVC’s success, if indeed he’s keeping a secret, is rather simple — if your conference has a lot of teams win a lot of games, it will have a lot of teams make the NCAA tournament.

Ah, but how you do get a lot of teams to win a lot of games?

In my own investigation, poring through historical data until my eyes bled, I found the following four keys to well-nigh guarantee your conference will get multiple bids to the NCAA tournament. All four must be met — fall short in any one, and you risk getting the same number of bids as the two conferences sending their teams to the Dayton play-in game.

They are:

• Your teams must win at least 60 percent of their collective nonconference games.
• It is not necessary — it’s counterproductive, in fact — to schedule more than one or two nonconference games against highly rated teams.
• Your top five or six teams must dominate the dregs of your conference, as well as the dregs they play from other conferences.
• However, those top five or six teams must not dominate any of the others in their class.

First, the 60 percent magic number. What such a high winning percentage does is guarantee your teams have a higher RPI going into conference play. This season, the Missouri Valley’s collective nonconference record against Division I foes was 66-27 — a .710 winning percentage, good for sixth among all conferences (ahead of the Pac-10). Even conference bottom-feeder Indiana State went 8-2.

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Last season, the MVC had a .703 nonconference winning percentage, and sent three teams. But as of only three years ago, the conference couldn’t break even, and like other mid-majors in a similar position, it was only able to get two bids because the NCAA picked its regular-season champion, which lost in the conference tournament, as an at-large team.

(By the way, Louisville and Cincinnati leaving for the Big East killed Conference USA. It went from a .651 nonconference winning percentage last year to .521 this year, sending its ranking from eighth to 13th. As a result, Memphis and UAB were the only teams from a conference that in the past has sent four or five teams to the tourney.)

Getting to this level is harder than it looks. This season, only eight out of 31 conferences reached a nonconference winning percentage greater than 60. Only five others did better than break-even. So how did the MVC improve?

This brings us to the second key — scheduling.

A note on RPI: it’s computed by multiplying a team’s winning percentage by one-fourth, adding that to one-half times its opponents’ average winning percentage, then adding that to one-fourth times the opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage. A win or loss on a neutral court counts as one win or loss. A win at home or a loss on the road counts as six-tenths of a win or loss. A loss at home or a win on the road counts as 1.4 wins or losses.

Strength of schedule counts for something, but it isn't everything. In fact, if you play nothing but a series of Texas-Pan Americans and win, that helps more than if you play nothing but a series of Dukes and lose.

For example, last season, the Atlantic 10 played the toughest nonconference schedule in the country. But by winning only 41 percent of its nonconference game, it only got the one automatic bid — and no special dispensation for trying hard.

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