Well, what are our chances now?

Well, lots of things last night shook up the old Valley. Evansville, the bonafide worst team in the MVC, managed to take out a sure fire NCAA tournament team in UNI. In addition, Creighton dealt us a fairly hard blow by beating SIU. But our chances of getting out of a play-in game aren’t dead yet. That said, we’ll need some help.

Tonight’s game at Missouri State is huge. It gives us the opportunity to finish 2-0 against the Bears, which would mathematically cause us to finish with a higher seed. Considering that we’ve already locked in higher seeds than SIU and Evansville, that would be huge. It, in essence would allow us to focus on passing one of Indiana State, Bradley, and Creighton. The issue with that is Bradley and Indiana State have the tie breaker against us. That means that we have* to finish one game ahead of either of those teams to pass them. Assuming that we win tonight, ONE of the following has to happen:

• Creighton loses to Bradley. We must beat Evansville in this scenario. We need tiebreaker points to work out.
• Bradley loses to Creighton, and Bradley loses to Wichita State. We must beat Evansville in this scenario.
• Indiana State loses to Illinois State and Missouri State. We must beat Evansville in this scenario.

We need one of those bullet points to occur. While we need some help, consider that Creighton and Bradley play each other, which effectively gets part of bullet point #1 or #2 completed. In addition, two Indiana State losses are not out of the question.

You’ll notice the * earlier. Technically, if three or more teams tie, the determinant is total wins against all tied teams. While we might sport an 0-2 record against a team, if we’re tied with several teams that we have wins against, theoretically there is a possibility that we could proceed to tiebreakers with said team. I haven’t run through all of the scenarios on this, but one clear one comes to mind. If we win tonight but lose on Saturday, and Missouri State wins on Saturday, and Indiana State loses to Illinois State and Missouri State, the teams will be in a three way tie (DU is 2-0 against MSU but 0-2 against INS. INS is 2-0 against DU but 0-2 against MSU, etc…). Therefore, that goes directly to tiebreakers, and we would need the points to work out.

Also, consider that tiebreaker points can change significantly over the next few days. As teams we have beat (Creighton) slip down that hurts us. The opposite holds true for us and other teams. From my looks at it, there’s too many moving pieces to definitively say that we do or don’t stack up against a team on tiebreaker points right now. More to come on that later in the week.

All one way to say that we really need to win tonight. Let’s get one more in the win column and take a look later this week on how things have to shake for us to get out of that Thursday night matchup.