Southwestern Athletic conference tournament preview

This is part 18 of a 33-part series in this blog, designed to give you all the information you need to know about each conference's tournament, and the postseason prospects of every single team in the conference.

Final standings:
Texas Southern 16-2
Alabama St 14-4
Southern 13-5
Prairie View A&M 12-6
Arkansas-Pine Bluff 9-9
Jackson St 9-9
Alabama A&M 8-10
Mississippi Valley St 5-13
Alcorn St 4-14
Grambling St 0-18

Conference tournament format:  At a neutral site in Houston, 9 of these teams are here.  Arkansas-Pine Bluff isn't, being postseason ineligible, apparently for wrongly certifying 124 student-athletes to be eligible.  Fun!  Meanwhile, Alabama St and Southern are postseason banned for APR, but they're still allowed to show up for this tournament.  Amazingly, this year is an improvement on the postseason eligibility front compared to last year.

They play from Tuesday March 10 to Saturday March 14, with two days to cover the quarterfinals.

Bracket:
1) Texas Southern vs. 8/9) Alcorn St/Grambling St
4) Prairie View A&M vs. 5) Jackson St
2) Alabama St vs. 7) Mississippi Valley St
3) Southern vs. 6) Alabama A&M

The stakes:
Texas Southern is not an automatic 16 seed.  Their RPI is all the way up to 129, which WILL be higher than a few schools.  They won at Michigan St and Kansas St and played a top-10 SoS in the non-con.  They've got to be ahead of a few teams, enough to avoid Dayton, at the least.  The committee has done everything short of saying they're looking for reasons to avoid having the SWAC champs play in Dayton every year.  This year, they've got one.

Of course, if someone else wins, that all goes to hell.  One subplot to key on:  if Alabama St and Southern meet in one semifinal...the other semifinal becomes a NCAA clinching scenario, since both ASU and SU are ineligible for the postseason.  So the real drama might be in the semifinal.  It's my understanding that if ASU or SU win this tournament, it'll be the team that advances the farthest in the tournament (read:  the other finalist) that will go to the NCAAs.