TBI's Conference Calling 2014-15 College Basketball Conference Previews (Part 2)

Back for more, eh? Expecting that the new guy over at BT Powerhouse, SB Nation's finest stop for all your Big Ten basketball needs, will mindlessly anoint his favorite conference as America's best?

If you expect that a guy who's glossed himself The Professor for the better part of a decade will do anything mindlessly, you obviously haven't passed through here much.

So let's check out Part 2 of TBI's conference rankings and see if the Big Ten does, in fact, reign supreme once more. (BTW, this is also post No. 100 in the sporadic history of this slightly-above-mediocre college basketball repository. So, yay me, I guess.)

Conference Calling: Players to Watch for Championship Week (Part I)

Conference tournaments begin in the next few hours, with the Big South tipping off near Myrtle Beach and the Horizon League playing its openers tonight.

It's about to get real, kids.

In honor of those events starting, let's examine each league and find one player who can determine his team's fate as relates to an automatic NCAA Tournament bid. We'll hit the first 10 today, the next 10 on Thursday and finish up on Saturday, by which point most brackets should be close to set.

Tournaments will be presented in the order they begin after the jump.

Conference Calling's 31 in 31 Series: 2012-13 MAAC Preview

The Conference Calling 31 in 31 preview series will examine each of the NCAA Division I auto-bid conferences (so no Great West or independents), one per day, leading up to college basketball's opening day on November 9. 

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It takes a sensational season for a team from the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference to rate an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. That's what happened last season, when Iona's Runnin' Gaels led the nation in scoring behind the nation's assist king Scott Machado.

MAAC brass were doing cartwheels when Iona took a huge halftime lead against BYU, but the wheels fell off as soon as the Gaels left the locker room. BYU's 25-point comeback was the biggest in tournament history, and Iona was left to slink back to New Rochelle as critics clucked that they didn't deserve a spot.

The muttered response from those same MAAC brass was likely something along the lines of "Thanks for nothin', Iona."

Now that Iona's poisoned the well against future MAAC juggernauts, it's back to one-bid business as usual. The thing is, there are a bunch of teams in the league that could acquit themselves well against No. 2 and No. 3 seeds.

Even the teams that aren't projected near the top feature players who bear watching. It's for that reason that the MAAC is No. 15 on TBI's conference rankings for the 2012-13 season.

Which of the many contenders will prevail? Read on.