This isn't going like we planned, 63!

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MBB Scholarship Chart

Back in a tie at the bottom with Drake, Evansville, and SIU. Illinois State and Bradley only a notch above us tied for fourth at 4-5.

The good news is we play Evansville, ISUr, and Bradley at home-- so we have a lot of control over our destiny. Also, we've already beaten Drake and Missouri State at home.

The bad news is this makes winning at SIU on Saturday even more crucial. The win against ISUb will also propel their RPI back above us, so even if we beat them on Saturday, they'll likely have the tiebreaker through RPI.

RPI isn't a tiebreaker. Non Con SOS is.

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The Roundhouse

We are sunk there.

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MBB Scholarship Chart

As I wrote--WE must win--Plainly and simply WIN !! Things will then pan out our way. We arrived at this juncture earlier than most thought--We were relegated to last place and apparently happily so by some.

We have accomplished a lot--SO we MUST keep plodding on. Would be nice if the rest rolled over for us--but--fagedddabout it !!!

WIN these games and we shall be fine. It will be doubly hard as we are the new kids on the block.

GO RAMBLERS !

Up until about 5 years ago we did use RPI as a tiebreaker. But in order to help encourage better/tougher scheduling, it was changed to reward those who try to help the conference by playing better competition outside of the conference.

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The Roundhouse

I was looking at the tournament bracket for the first time last night, and it's a little interesting.

As we all know, the bottom four (seeds 7-10) have to play a Thursday night game. The way the bracket is set up, the winner of the 8/9 game plays the 1 seed (WSU) at noon the next day. If you are the 8 or 9 seed, your weekend will be over by 2:00 on Friday when you lose to Wichita.

The winner of the 7/10 game plays the 2 seed at 6:05 the next day. Right now, Indiana State is in second, and two games ahead of third place UNI. If you win Thursday, you have extra rest time and a much more winnable game in this scenario.

If you're going to play on Thursday, you're better off being the 10 seed than the 8 or 9.

Along the same lines, I'd rather be the 6 seed than the 4 or 5. If you're the 6, you play Friday night against the 3, and you're on the opposite side of the bracket from the Shox.

Of course, there's no way to engineer things to get an ideal seed. This is all the result of one team being far and away the best in the league.

Here's the bracket: http://cdn.streamlinetechnologies.com/m ... ket_v1.pdf

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MBB Scholarship Chart

Thanks for posting this, ahunte1. Just after the WSU game I was thinking about putting up a sticky post updating where we stand vis-a-vis the tournament format. I'm still learning how it all works, and the fact that the RPI Report isn't updated daily makes it more complicated (although our non-con strength of schedule would not change dramatically unless some of our non-con opponents' RPI changes significantly-- too late for that now, and the difference between us and SIU, etc. is probably too much to make up). I still don't have a firm grasp on the "mini round robin" tiebreaker for multiple team ties.

I might get some more info from the league office to clear it up, because I think it would be fun/interesting to track our possibilities.

I agree, that would be fun. I'll think about a way that it could work and be updated.

The "mini round robin" is just a count of how many wins you have against the teams you are tied with -- compared to the win totals of the other teams vs. that group.

For example, if Loyola, Bradley, and Drake are all tied, we would win based on the fact that we are going to sweep both of them and have four wins in that "mini round robin".

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MBB Scholarship Chart

Sure, pick an easy scenario....

What if we're tied with three other teams, and we're 2-0 against one of them, 0-2 against one of them, and 1-1 against another. In other words, of the four teams, we're tied with another for the same number of wins within the mini round robin, over and above two others. Do we then go to the head-to-head tiebreaker with the team we're tied with within the mini round robin, and the other two teams go to the head to head tiebreaker for the lower two seeds? Or does the fact that there's no ordered outcome for all four teams within the mini round robin throw the determination to the non-con SOS tiebreaker?