KANSAS CITY, Mo. - There was an ad that circulated electronically in front of the scorer's table every few seconds at the Big 12 tournament last week.
"Nation's No. 1 RPI Conference."
That, and a quarter, will get you a bag of Gummy Bears. The assertion is true, but there is a difference between ranking and performance this time of year.
The Big 12 is projected to get seven of its 10 teams into the tournament when the bracket is released later Sunday, according to Jerry Palm. That would tie a record in the 21-year-old conference.
Now it must perform. That Ratings Percentage Index is only one measure the men's selection committee uses to evaluate teams. In multiple years the Big 12 has been that RPI "champion." That's great for the regular season.
Even though it has had two Final Four teams since 2012 (Kansas, 2012; Oklahoma, 2016), there is a general feeling the Big 12 has underperformed in the postseason.
In this decade, the Missouri Valley, West Coast and American conferences have combined for more Final Four appearances (three), than the Big 12 (two). Among Power Five leagues, only the Pac-12 (one) has fewer.
Since 1985, only the Pac-10/12 (.531) has a worse NCAA Tournament winning percentage than the Big 12 (.572) among the Power Five.
"We've got to win some games in the postseason that's the coin of the realm," commissioner Bob Bowlsby said. "It doesn't matter how many we get in, we gotta be successful once we get there."
The postseason has been a line of demarcation for the league. The Big 12 had a fine 106-22 nonconference record this season. It won five in-season tournaments.
It has one hall of fame coach, Bill Self at Kansas, and probably two others in the future, Lon Kruger (Oklahoma) and Bob Huggins (West Virginia). But the last and only national championship was won by Kansas in 2008.
"When we won it in '08 everybody said the Big 12 needed to win a title to validate this," Self said. "In '12 we went back ... It would help our league from an image standpoint if one of us got there."
The thing is, the Big 12 has volume but not necessarily excellence. Kansas is expected to get its sixth No. 1 seed this decade on Sunday. After that, the chances of success decline. Palm has West Virginia as the next highest seeded team (No. 3). The bottom three include Kansas State, Texas (both No. 10 seeds) and Oklahoma as one of the last four teams playing at Dayton.
The rise and fall of Trae Young sort of parallels that of the Big 12 this season. Until mid-January, Oklahoma's fantastic freshman was leading the country in scoring and assists.
Then he was hit square in the face with the rigors of Big 12 conference play. The Sooners lost eight of their last 10 and 10 of their last 14.
Does anyone think that team is going to make a run?
Even the most optimistic fan has to admit this is one of Self's least talented teams. Devonte Graham was the Big 12 player of the year but Kansas goes into the tournament hoping the knee of center Udoka Azubuike can heal.
Without him, Mitch Lightfoot and Silvio De Sousa combined for 46 points and 30 rebounds in three Big 12 tournament games.
But there just seems to be something missing about these Jayhawks. They lost three at home for the first time since 1998-99. On Jan. 2, Kansas lost for the first time by double-digits in a home conference game for the first time in the Self era.
"We're still one of the top DI teams in the nation," guard Malik Newman said. "Don't count us out just because the big fella is hurt. We can still win games."
Any discussion about the Big 12 comes back to its double-round-robin format. Each team plays the other nine opponents home and away. There are no misses.
It's been that way since 2012 when the league shrank to 10 teams.
In the age of super conferences, that's a rarity. In the SEC it can take six years or longer for all the members to play each other in football. The 14-team Big Ten will go almost two weeks between its conference tournament and the NCAA Tournament.
"The Big Ten will look at it and say one of two things," Bowlsby said. "Either they're rusty from being off a week or you play this weekend and you're tired from playing up until the tournament."
The Big 12 isn't going to be rusty. Coaches continually call the conference schedule a "grind." And they aren't particularly happy about a challenge series in January that comes in the middle of that grind.
The league should also be proud of regular-season wins against Kentucky (by Kansas), Virginia (West Virginia), Nevada (Texas Tech and TCU) as well as Oregon, USC and Wichita State (Oklahoma).
"Basketball's screwy," Self said. "There's three or four teams in the country, whether they win their league or not, whether they win their conference tournament, everybody knows if they play their best, they're better than everybody else. Nobody in our league is one of those teams.
"But that's really a compliment to our league, saying we've got this many good teams. [Texas' Mo] Bamba's a lottery pick and Trae's a lottery pick but other than that, how many first-rounders do we have in our league? I think that speaks volumes to how good the teams are."
Aside from Kansas, the only existing Big 12 teams to make the Elite Eight since 2009 are Kansas State and Oklahoma. Missouri made it that year but has since moved on to the SEC.
If the tournament is about guard play, the Big 12 should be set. Young and Graham were first-team all-conference. So was West Virginia's Jevon Carter, a two-time Big 12 defensive player of the year.
Newman was the most outstanding player of the conference tournament.
"To me, it's never been better top to bottom with point guards," Baylor coach Scott Drew said. "If you have great point guards you've got a chance to win any game."
The problem is, the Big 12 hasn't won enough of them in March when the RPI suddenly doesn't mean a damn thing.