Bradley may be a Thursday squad. They now sit at 3-5 with 2 games each still remaining vs Drake, Missouri State and Indiana State. They are now 0-2 vs Valpo and ISUr.

Not the Valley, but Michigan State lost to Rutgers, 67-37. Ouch.

There go two Q2 wins.

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There is not a chance in the world the Valley will get two teams in. With the amount of money lost last season I'm surprised they are even allowing the auto-bids this year and not just doing a straight P5 tournament. Just my thought process, so these Q1 or whatever wins don't make a difference. Yes, I still want to win the regular season and not be relegated to having to pull a Bradley, but I feel like any non p-5 team is going to find themselves in this situation.

NET disagrees. (As do the polls but they don’t count)

Long way to go, but I think your take is overly pessimistic. For what it's worth, we are a "Last 4 In" on The Athletic today.

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There are definitely paths to 2 valley teams getting in at this point in the season. It’s tough, but would definitely happen if:

1) Drake wins out regular season and loses to Loyola or anyone else at any point in arch madness; they finish with one loss. - Drake is in.
2) Drake and Loyola split regular season, both of them win out their other games, and Loyola wins arch madness - drake is in.
3) Loyola wins out regular season and loses to Drake in the championship. Loyola is in.
4) Loyola beats Drake in the regular season twice and wins out, and drake wins out. Drake and Loyola meet in the arch madness championship and Loyola wins. Drake’s only 3 losses of the season are to a top 15 net ranked Loyola. Drake is in.

Those are just 4 possible scenarios where it would be nearly impossible to not get an at-large.

The flip side of traveling to all of the other top teams in the league like Drake and Missouri State (and Bradley/Indiana State) is that those are chances for quality wins now. Indiana State is a Q2 game (top 135 NET) and Bradley dipped out of Q2 last night, but could get back in. Missouri State is just outside of Q1 (top 75 NET). Drake is currently 9th in NET. That's potentially eight quality games for us in-conference, and we're 3-1 in them right now.

We have to keep winning, but if we do, we'll have a tournament quality resume -- and the brand name to go along with it.

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One interesting scenario is:

Drake and Loyola split regular season, both of them win their other games. Drake loses in semis to Bradley/ISUb (i.e., not a BAD loss (although Bradley might be a bad loss by then)) and then Bradley/ISUb beats Loyola in the championship. That would put Drake at 27-2 and Loyola at 23-5. Unfortunately, I think the Ramblers would be left out in this scenario even though they'd likely be a top 30/35 NET.

That really would be interesting! That is by far the best scenario to get 3 teams in for sure, but I agree the committee won’t let it happen. They are already going to get crap for putting a couple blue blood teams in that shouldn’t be there.