There's still several games and in some cases several weeks yet to go plus conference tournaments so the evaluation process is not anywhere near to being completed. If there is a message to be relayed today, it's that it is still too early to say what will happen.

After the automatic qualifiers are named, conference affiliation really plays no part of the process. To look at it in terms of the Missouri Valley being comparable with any other league, we don't look at it in terms of that. We look at what each and every school has done.

It's only a coincidence that they happen to be from one conference. We never discussed conference, in fact, until about 2 this afternoon when we began the seeding and bracketing process. I would not have been able to tell you how many from this conference or that conference were in the field at that point in time.

We have to dig beneath the surface and determine what the records mean. One team's 8-8 conference record might not be the same as another team's 8-8 record in the same conference. We need to clearly evaluate what each team has done.

You have to face the reality that teams have conference records. So our job is to dig beneath the surface, even among teams that have the same conference records in some conferences.

I think we would need to take a look at where the games are played, particularly in situations where there would be one play between two conference members with identical records. The statistics in all circumstances would favor the home team. So, if two teams with 9-7 records played each other once, chances are the home team is going to win that game. We would have to continue to dig in terms of trying to come up with some sort of tiebreaker that would allow us to come up with some determination as to which is the better team.