Ohio Valley Conference
March 2-5. All games at Nashville.
kPOY: Evan Bradds, Belmont.

The OVC tournament gets underway Wednesday with two first round games in Nashville.

The OVC still clings to a divisional format, presumably to not hurt feelings. The conference then gives the division winners the top two seeds and seeds the rest of the teams by record. It also employs the double-stepladder bracket where teams seeded five through eight must win two more games than the division winners.

The combination of these things produced a bizarre scenario this season. Tennessee Martin and Murray State tied atop the much weaker West division with 10-6 records. But UT Martin won the tiebreaker, which amounts to a coin flip, and Murray’s poor record relative to teams in the East division dropped them all the way to a six-seed.

This all works to the benefit of Belmont, who is the top-seed and gets a slight proximity boost here. Still, it’s a fairly wide open field. Tennessee State has been one of the more surprising stories in the country. The Tigers won five games last season and were ranked #301 in the preseason. They missed the OVC tourney the past two seasons and have the worst tournament record in the OVC in this millennium. Yet they have a realistic shot of winning the automatic bid.

                     Qtrs Semis Final Champ
 1 Belmont            100   100  61.5  40.4
 3 Morehead St.       100  65.5  46.0  21.5
 4 Tennessee St.      100  68.2  29.7  17.9
 2 Tennessee Martin   100   100  34.5   9.5
 6 Murray St.        69.6  27.7  16.8   6.3
 5 Tennessee Tech    65.3  23.8   7.3   3.4
 7 Eastern Illinois  30.4   6.8   2.7   0.5
 8 Austin Peay       34.7   8.1   1.5   0.5

OVC tournament records (since 1999)

Belmont          6- 1
Murray St.      25-11
Austin Peay     17-12
Morehead St.    16-12
E. Kentucky     11-10
SE Missouri St. 10-10
Tennessee Tech  12-15
E. Illinois      6-10
Jacksonville St. 2- 4
Tenn. Martin     3- 9
Tennessee St.    4-14