Tom Gannam / AP

Wichita State head coach Mark Turgeon's team is virtually a lock to make the NCAA Tournament.

Now, to the fourth key — the conference’s top teams not dominating each other.

While the MVC’s top six dominated the bottom four, they played each other generally straight up during the regular season. Southern Illinois and Creighton were 6-4 against the other top six, Wichita State and Northern Iowa, 5-5, and Bradley and Missouri State, 4-6. Combined with their relative dominance over losing teams, what that parity in effect did was stabilize those teams’ high RPI, thus completing the illusion — a term Doug Elgin most definitely would not care for — of a deep, competitive conference.

For the opposite effect, let’s go back to the Atlantic 10. The only way a second team is getting in is if someone beats 26-1 George Washington in the conference tournament. As impressive as it is for George Washington that it could go 16-0 in the Atlantic 10, winning the conference by five games, for the other teams, the failure to beat the Colonials (as well as their losses against the conference’s dregs) put a chink in their RPI armor.

Now that the MVC has put itself in a position to send six teams, the question is, will the NCAA actually take them all? Likely, no — though that’s not because the big conferences are muscling the NCAA selection committee.

This year isn’t unusual in that the big six conferences are likely to get 32 or 33 bids. With 20 or 21 conferences likely to get only single bids, that leaves 11 to 13 slots open for mid-major, at-large bids.

What is unusual is that rather than those bids being spread among five or six conferences, they could go to as few as three — the MVC, the Colonial and Conference USA. The other conferences can’t blame the big boys for slurping them up. They can blame the MVC for getting a likely five bids (Creighton, at 42, is in an RPI spot where even big-conference schools can get pushed to the wrong side of the bubble), and the Colonial for getting three (Hofstra, George Mason and North Carolina-Wilmington, all with RPIs at or near 30). If any single-bid conference is to match Conference USA’s two bids, it’ll need help from upsets in big-conference tournaments, or upsets in their own. (The Patriot League could get two bids if Bucknell — RPI of 50 — loses in the conference title game, for example.)

And what about those MVC schools when they get to the tourney? The conference has won seven games in the last 10 years, with two Sweet Sixteen appearances, an impressive achievement for a mid-major.

But as with Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, the point of Doug Elgin’s MVC strategy is to get there. It's literal Moneyball — the more teams that go, the greater the share of tournament dollars for MVC schools, which unlike major conferences can’t rely on football to support their athletic departments, particularly because half of them don’t even field a team.

At least three of the five MVC teams — none of whom will be seeded higher than ninth — will probably flame out the first game. Southern Illinois, which is peaking now, particularly on defense, has a good shot of winning at least one game. Northern Iowa has experience this year playing and beating good teams, so it has the best shot of any MVC team of making the Sweet Sixteen — but going no further.

Even if the MVC goes zero-for-five in the NCAA tournament, will that taint what Elgin and his teams were able to accomplish? Not for them, it won’t. However, the MVC’s detractors wouldn’t find it hard to believe that might send Elgin back to the lab for further tweaking of his “Moneyball” formula.

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Jae C. Hong / AP

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