Planting the Seeds: Valpo's path to a first-round bye

MBB: The Beacons are in position to avoid Thursday at Arch Madness, but they still need help

When Valparaiso was in the Horizon League, I used to create elaborate spreadsheets every year that tracked each men’s basketball game as it pertained to seeding for the conference tournament.

What did Valpo need to happen for a home game? For a bye? For a conference championship? I’d spend hours number-crunching and color-coding Excel files.

Those were the good old days.

Those spreadsheets became a thing of the past when Valparaiso joined the Missouri Valley Conference in 2017. Just once in the last eight years has Valpo avoided the dreaded Thursday “play-in” slot, and rarely have the final regular-season games mattered beyond what uniform the Beacons would be wearing or what time they’d play in St. Louis.

Well, fire up some Buck Owens and Susan Raye, because the good old days are here again.

With Valpo’s win against UIC on Saturday, the Beacons now find themselves in a realistic position to earn a first-round bye at Arch Madness with two games remaining in the regular season.

Valparaiso doesn’t control its own fate, but there are plenty of the 2,048 remaining scenarios where the Beacons can avoid playing on Thursday and earn a Friday spot.

Let’s break it all down.