Jerry Palm Teams Quotations

What it means is that you can't simply trust conference records to be a method of evaluating teams in the same conference. Everybody in that league will get a chance to play some good teams at some point, but not all 8-8's are the same.

Vanderbilt's got two Top-25 RPI wins, over Old Dominion and Western Kentucky. That's more than a lot of teams. But Arkansas is a bad loss. All the teams that have beaten Vanderbilt are pretty good except Arkansas.

This year, the conference is just better. They did what they had to do to earn national respect. They scheduled tough games and they won a lot of them. Even teams in the lower part of the conference, teams like Air Force, really improved their RPI.

I'm kind of skeptical of that. They may not have the restriction, but it remains to be seen how many under-.500 teams start to show up in the tournament.

They are going to need to get higher in the polls than ninth or 10th, however that happens. Either teams ahead of them need to lose, or the pollsters would need to help them out.

The trouble with figuring out where New Mexico is going is that the women's selection committee's decisions are really tough to predict, and New Mexico has to fall in line behind BYU and Utah. Those teams have to get higher seeds and favorable draws close to home. New Mexico can't be in the same side of the bracket, so their destiny depends on how the selection committee views BYU and Utah.

There may not be any top 25 teams - but 26 through 40, six of them might be in that group. There's been an opportunity this year because of weaknesses in the major conferences, other than the Big East and Big Ten. It's just one of those things where all these (factors) came together at once.