With Conference USA play hitting the two-thirds mark this weekend, a few trends have emerged, including:
n The league is top-heavy;
n From a Rating Percentage Index standpoint, the league is down;
n Even league leader Alabama-Birmingham may not have the resume for an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament, if the Blazers fall in the league tourney in their home city;
n And those Blazers have one of the toughest remaining schedules.
All teams are playing their 12th league game this weekend. Marshall (12-12 overall, 8-3 C-USA) and Western Kentucky (12-12, 4-7) tip off at 8 p.m. Saturday at Diddle Arena in Bowling Green.
The Blazers (21-4, 11-1), who won 80-77 in double overtime at Southern Mississippi (7-15, 4-7) on Thursday, have four of their last six on the road. That includes Saturday's game at Louisiana Tech (17-6, 6-4) and a trip to Middle Tennessee (17-6, 9-2) next week.
That's three of the other four teams above .500 in the C-USA standings. That's right - only five of the 14 teams are above .500, with Texas-El Paso (14-11, 6-6) climbing to break-even with an 84-74 win over Florida International (11-14, 5-7).
That isn't good for the league's RPI, which is ranked 21st of the 32 Division I conferences, down from 17th last year. That 21st ranks behind the Mid-American, Summit, Big West, Metro Atlantic and Southern, among others.
Oh, it gets worse. The five above-.500 teams - UAB, Middle Tennessee, Marshall, Louisiana Tech and Old Dominion (14-10, 7-4) - were in the top 150 in RPI on Thursday, but only MTSU was in the top 100, at 79th. UAB was 101st.
And then there were the six teams outside the top 250, with Texas-San Antonio (342) at the rear. With 351 Division I teams overall, the Roadrunners (4-21, 2-10) are inside the bottom 10.
Bracketologists are heaping more disrespect on the league, and on UAB. CBS' Jerry Palm has consistently slotted the Blazers as a 14th seed for the NCAA Tournament, and ESPN's Joe Lunardi has them as a 15th seed.
That would suggest that C-USA is projected to be a one-bid league no matter what, even if UAB wins out to the conference tournament finals and then loses to finish 29-5. It seems ridiculous, but the Blazers are just 1-0 against the RPI top 100 and 5-4 against 101-200 teams. Their strength of schedule ranked 300th.
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The league does a better job of populating the National Invitational Tournament and the less established College Basketball Invitational and CollegeInsider.com Tournament.
Five C-USA teams have advanced to the NIT in the last two seasons, 12 since 2010. Ten have gone to the 6-year-old CIT, with East Carolina winning in 2013. Marshall played in the 2010 and 2011 tournaments, going 1-2.
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A note on this year's C-USA tournament, which begins March 8: All teams will participate, minus NCAA-penalized Southern Miss.
There is a wrinkle: The Nos. 12 and 13 seeds will play on March 8 at Bartow Arena on the UAB campus, with the winner taking on the No. 5 seed the next day. The usual 11-vs.-6, 10-vs.-7 and 9-vs.-8 games also are played that day at Legacy Arena downtown, with the top four seeds getting the usual bye to the quarterfinals.
Here's the confusing part: That play-in game is being referred to as the first round, with the usual first round becoming the second round. The NCAA tournament discarded that strange practice this season.