If you're Duke, Syracuse, or North Carolina you can probably rest your starters, coast the rest of the way, and still find yourself with a relatively high NCAA tournament seed.
But for many other teams, making the field of 68 won't come as easy.
February's in-conference schedule can be make or break for these schools, with one quality win being the difference between the NCAAs or the NIT.
Having a crazy run through your conference tournament like UConn did last season en route to the national championship certainly helps as well.
Xavier was considered a top mid-major school coming into the year, but it hasn't quite worked out that way for the Muskies. There are no locks out of the Atlantic-10 this year, so Xavier will probably have to win its conference tournament to get in.
Losing five of their last six games does not bode well for West Virginia. The Mountaineers will have a chance at redemption, though, as they face Notre Dame and Marquette before the end of the season.
Cal is the only Pac-12 team that has even a slight chance of making the field without winning its conference tournament. So for a team like Colorado every game left is "must win," especially when those RPI (74) and strength of schedule rankings (85) aren't very pretty.
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