Doug Elgin Quotations

The outcome of the championship game puts us in a position where I believe in my heart that we deserve and will get five. If there are a lot of at-large bids gobbled up by upsets, potentially we could get fewer, but I don't think there's any question that we have six teams right now that I think are NCAA Tournament-caliber.

We're keeping coaches in place. Dana Altman sets the example. He understands you can accomplish just as much at Creighton as you can at Big State U. His program has been in postseason play for eight consecutive seasons. And kids in the Midwest see Valley schools playing in sold-out arenas, taking on the best teams in the nation, and getting more television exposure. It's coming together for us. We're having a bunch of programs mature at the same time.

Money can't buy you a Goliath. It can't buy you an unbeatable team. You gotta have someone who can coach them, someone who can mold them into a unit. You can really equalize things with kids who grow up in a solid program, who become seniors. They have the opportunity to take advantage of the youth and inexperience of some of these major programs that might be playing them in the Tournament.

If I miss any part of service on the committee, it?s that.

I think the entire country was holding its collective breath when she got hurt. I've never experienced that type of total silence there. It scared the daylights out of all of us.

I think there were two games in our tournament... that were elimination games.

I think there's still a feeling that we're not for real among some of the talking heads. But I think we'll truly be a conference to be reckoned with on Selection Sunday.

Nationally, I think you're starting to see an emergence of programs that may not be at the tip of the tongue of the media but are starting to be viewed very differently.

We had to upgrade our RPI. To do that you have go on the road, you have to play good teams and you have to win.

We've had discussions with other conferences about adding games that would be worthy of national exposure. It's difficult to do. We're trying to be as aggressive as we possibly can.

We haven't had a lot of marquee wins since Southern Illinois went to the Sweet 16 in 2002. But we have played well against teams that advanced deep into the tournament.

The pressure is five times greater than it's ever been, and if we go 1-4 or something, everyone will think we've failed.

We definitely think it's not in our teams' best interest to go to Maryland for the money.

We're under siege and I don't get it. We deserved every bid. We earned them. We deserved six bids and we should have had five, because I don't understand how they can look at Missouri State and not put them in.

We're very concerned when something like this happens. We don't want to curtail unnecessarily anything viewed in cheerleading culture as routine. But we don't want the risk of serious or catastrophic injuries.

So the dilemma the basketball committee has is this: If you don't take five, who do you leave out?

As Craig Littlepage apparently pointed out, that slate is wiped clean.

There's a buzz when he makes those calls. I know when he calls one of our coaches, I hear about it.

They're closer than they've ever been. The difference between 5 and 13 is almost insignificant. You have a No. 13 in Bradley playing a No. 4 in Kansas. I don't think it's a mistake in the seeding. The teams were fairly evenly matched.

They're entitled to their opinion. I don't think that's the proper forum, to take on the chair and question his integrity. In that situation, I think it was wrong, ... terrible.

There's a lot of joy and elation for those four teams.

There's a preponderance of evidence that we're stronger than we've ever been. We have faith in the process.

It's a free-market system. We were competing with all the conferences, and Saturdays were the most problematic.

It's really helped, I think, to raise the level of officiating. We now look at ourselves differently than we did 15 years ago. We demand more of ourselves.

It's pretty obvious the national media needs to take a better look at what we have to offer.

The attacks were inappropriate, they were skewering the chair and calling out the committee. It was way, way off the charts, below the belt. It was unnecessary.

Take away the brand name (Missouri Valley Conference) and put the name of another league on our shirt, and there is no question in people's mind that we should be a five-bid league this year.

It's very important we back up this season.

I miss the selection weekend. Not knowing is agony.

I just thought it was too long and too harsh. You can win a lot of arguments with a selective cut of data and I think that's what those guys did.

I'll probably be jittery watching all the other games play out. But I believe in the system.

If you're a national analyst and you're going to criticize the national committee then you ought to be as knowledgeable as the committee.

I think our cup overflows with everything good that's happened.

The magnitude of the weekend hasn't sunk in. It's going to take some time to absorb all this. I think it's pretty clear that parity is here, much more parity than people realize or believe. I think what's happening is a sign of things to come. You're going to see a Colonial or a Missouri Valley team one step away from the Final Four.