There are only 12 games on Monday – if the Lunatic was sane, this would be a good day to make progress on his bracketology and get a good night’s sleep. We will see what really happens.

For these early days, I like to focus on the smaller conferences that are having their finals. Without the power conferences playing, this is their opportunity to shine as they have the spotlight.

So far, 5 teams have punched their tickets to the dance. Drake (MVC), High Point (Big South), Lipscomb (Atlantic 10), and Omaha (Summit) all won their conference title on Sunday to join SIU-Edwardsville (OVC) as teams with automatic bids. One thing the Lunatic liked about Sunday is that all 4 teams were either the regular season champions or co-champions.

If you are looking for what to watch on Monday, there are two more bids being decided – with both games at 7 pm. The Sun Belt conference was wild with a 4 way tie for their regular season championship. Two of those teams – Troy and Arkansas State – will play for the title tonight.

The other conference championship is the Southern Conference tournament – which has seen carnage to the top seeds. 5th place Furman will take on 6th place Wofford to earn the right to represent the Southern Conference in the NCAA Tournament.

As for the other games, the Southland quarterfinals, and the Big Sky, Horizon and Colonial semi-finals continue. But the games of most interest won’t start until 9 pm out in the West Coast conference. Their semi-finals have Pepperdine (who have upset Santa Clara and Oregon State to get here) against #21 St. Mary’s in the first game and Gonzaga tries to improve their bubble status when they play San Francisco in the late game.

If you are a fan of any bubble team, you should be rooting hard for St. Mary’s and Gonzaga – I suspect both teams are clearly in the field (although Gonzaga is a little bit complicated). If San Francisco or Pepperdine can win two more games today and tomorrow, they will clearly steal a big from the bubble (as St. Mary’s will need an at-large bid).

The WCC this year also adds an interesting fact that I am sure will get missed by many including the committee. We constantly hear the argument that we should select the below .500 team from a power conference (like Georgia or Vanderbilt) over a mid-major champion who lost in their conference tournament, because clearly if that power conference team played in the mid-major, they would dominate – while the mid-major champion certainly would not have 27 wins playing in the SEC.

The reason the WCC conference is interesting is because of the demise of the Pac 12. Left without a conference, Washington State and Oregon State joined the WCC in basketball so they could play in a conference as they try to rebuild the Pac 12. So we should have our test case to the comment above – obviously Washington State and Oregon State are going to dominate – after all, Washington State finished 2nd in the last year of the Pac 12 and won their first-round game in the tournament before losing to #2 seed Iowa State in the Round of 32.

Well, that dominance never happened. Washington State finished 6th in the conference at 8-10 (despite going 10-3 in the non-conference schedule) and lost by 11 in the quarterfinals to San Francisco. Oregon State finished 5th in the conference at 10-8 (despite also going 10-3 in the non-conference schedule) and lost their first round game to Pepperdine by 4.

You could say that the WCC isn’t the same since Gonzaga and St. Mary’s are tourney teams each year. Well, if you take those teams out, the two Pac 12 schools still lost 10 regular season games to other WCC schools (as well as both their WCC tournament games). You could argue that they were destroyed by the demise of the Pac 12 – that might be accurate but you would expect a power conference team would have held on to enough talent to be able to handle teams like Pepperdine (no offense meant to the Waves but they are 12-21 on the season).

There is a lot of good basketball that is being played in the non power conferences. The next time a 28-5 team like last year’s Indiana State loses in their conference championship game, maybe we can look at that team a little bit differently than simply assuming that they would lose most of their games against power conference teams. Based on the Pac 12 teams, it looks like those sub-500 power conference teams might not dominate the mid-major conference like you would expect.