Maybe the problem was just a lack of imagination.

Nobody could really imagine the idea that the Missouri Valley Conference was one of the best leagues in basketball this season. Nor could they bring themselves to the necessary follow-up – that six of the league’s teams were deserving of bids to the NCAA Tournament. That would have been more than the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, or Pac 10, and as many as the SEC.

Surely, the little MVC, a league mostly made it up of private midwestern colleges and a few smaller public ones, couldn’t be one of the elite leagues in college basketball … could it?

Actually, it could and it is, as the league showed this weekend. Only four MVC teams received bids to the Big Dance, and none was seeded higher than no. 7. Despite that snub, two of them – Bradley and Wichita State – are headed to the Sweet 16. And they made it by knocking off four major conference teams – Pitt and Seton Hall from the Big East, Tennessee from the SEC, and Kansas from the Big 12. Meanwhile, the two MVC teams wrongly excluded form the tournament – Creighton and Missouri St. – both cruised to easy first round wins in the NIT this week. Sum it up and the little MVC is 6-2 in tournament play thus far.

The reason the MVC got short shrift was because nobody could bring themselves to accept this new reality. If the major conferences got all the best recruits and had the vast majority of the NBA first-round draft picks, how could a league like the MVC possibly compete?

The answer lies in the bigger picture of what’s going on in college basketball. Take a look at the roster of a Bradley or a Wichita State and you’ll notice something that’s not common at the major schools – seniors. Most of those high-level recruits the major conferences nab only stay for a year or two before bolting for the pros.

Look at North Carolina, for instance. A year ago they were a relatively young team, with a star freshman forward in Marvin Wiliams and three outstanding juniors in Sean May, Raymond Felton, and Rashad McCants. Back in the old days, those four would have come back to terrorize the NCAA and make a run at a repeat championship.

Instead, the Tar Heels lost all four of those players. This season they started two freshmen and had four in the rotation, and ended up losing to somebody named George Mason (Anthony’s little brother perhaps?) in the second round yesterday. As a matter of fact, the Tar Heels were lucky Felton, May, and Mc-Cants stayed as long as they did. Most of the time, those players are gone after a year or two.

And that makes the current NCAA tournament a more interesting mix. Essentially, there are two very different kinds of teams competing. On the one hand, you have “mid-major” teams like Wichita State, Bradley, Gonzaga, and George Mason. These all are veteran teams, to the extent any collegians can be called veterans. Between the four there are no freshman starters and only five underclassmen.

On the other side there are the schools from the so-called power conferences, most of whom are much younger than their mid-major counterparts. Florida, for instance, won the SEC tournament with four sophomores in the starting lineup, while Kansas took the Big 12’s tourney with three freshmen starting and no upperclassmen in its top seven.

Both Kansas and Florida are insanely talented, boasting several future NBA first-round draft picks between them. By comparison, Bradley and Gonzaga have one each (Bradley’s seven foot center Patrick O’Bryant and Gonzaga’s prolific scorer Adam Morrison), while Wichita St. and George Mason will be lucky to send anybody to the CBA, let alone the NBA.

Using this explanation, it’s a lot easier to see how the mid-majors have been able to achieve such success. Yes, it helps to occasionally get lucky with a player like O’Bryant or Morrison, but it’s the surrounding core of experienced players that provides a consistent advantage. The one thing that stood out in the tournament’s first two rounds was how the mid-major teams wouldn’t beat themselves and played incredibly cohesively – factors that only came about because they’d been playing together for so long.

For the most part, the Floridas and Kansases of the world haven’t had this advantage. Of course, there will always be a couple of big-time schools fortunate enough to have both experience and big-time talent. Duke, with senior guard J.J. Redick and senior forwad Shelden Williams, is one such example, and that makes them virtually unbeatable. But they’re the exception rather than the rule.

Occasionally, it comes together brilliantly for the younger teams, as it did for Florida this weekend, and in those cases the mid-majors can’t keep up. In Florida’s case, it was perhaps the single best team in the tournament’s first weekend, tearing apart South Alabama and Wisconsin-Milwaukee by a combined 48 points thanks to its rapidly improving frontcourt combo of Joakim Noah and Al Horford.

Noah in particular probably improved his draft stock more than any player in college hoops this weekend. The Gators’ 6-foot-11 -inch center shocked and awed with his speed, intensity, ballhandling, and passing skill. His numbers for the two games look like something off Andrei Kirilenko’s resume – averages of 16.5 points, 7.5 rebounds, 6.5 assists, 4.5 blocks, and 2.5 steals.

Of particular note are those 6.5 assists per game. In the NCAA, even good point guards have trouble compiling six assists a night – there’s less scoring and more of it comes on free throws, so assists are far less common. For a center to do it is simply unheard of. But Noah picked apart the two opponents’ full-court pressure defenses with ease and constantly set up Horford for easy baskets.

For the power conference schools, that’s what it looks like when everything’s clicking – a talent show that overwhelms anything an MVC school can offer. But on most nights, the MVC clubs’ experience has more than made up for the talent gap. That’s why the league deserved more than the four bids it received, and that’s why two of its teams still are playing in the NCAA Tournament – and could be for a while longer.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.