OKLAHOMA CITY | The good news about college basketball now is that you really don&#8217;t have to wait until Selection Sunday to find out what will happen to your favorite team. No, all you have to do these days is pop on the Internet (pretty much any Web address will do) and you will find full bracket tournament projections. And these projections are not made by just anyone. No. They come from men and women who spent years studying the science of &#8220;Bracketology.&#8221;</p><p>Here are just a few of those projections:</p><p>&#8226;<em>Sports Illustrated: </em>Kansas (3-seed) goes to Boise to play Stephen F. Austin; Missouri (3-seed) goes to Minneapolis to play North Dakota State; Kansas State was considered and is out.</p><p>&#8226;CBS Sportsline&#8217;s Jerry Palm: Kansas (3-seed) goes to Minneapolis to play Miami, Ohio; Missouri (4-seed) goes to Portland to play Virginia Commonwealth; Kansas State was on the fence and is out.</p><p>&#8226;Yahoo Sports: Kansas (3-seed); Missouri (4-seed); Kansas State is out.</p><p>&#8226;Bracketography: Kansas (3-seed) plays American in Minneapolis; Missouri (4-seed) plays Portland State in Boise; Kansas State is out.</p><p>&#8226;ESPN&#8217;s Joe Lunardi: Kansas (2-seed) plays Radford in Kansas City; Missouri (4-seed) plays North Dakota State in Boise; Kansas State is out.</p><p>And so on. Now, it should be said here that these bracketologists &#8212; no, I never get tired of that word &#8212; are generally pretty accurate about these things. They will miss a team or three, miss a few seeds, but all in all they tend to look at things more or less the same way as the NCAA Tournament selection committee. They might not be precisely right, but most of the time they are not off by much. And we can take some things from their projections:</p><p>&#8226;1. If the Jayhawks can win the Big 12 tournament, they can secure a spot in Kansas City for the first two rounds of the tournament. If not, they will probably get shipped out.</p><p>&#8226;2. Missouri, one way or another, looks like a good bet to get shipped out to Boise. It&#8217;s unfortunate that I already visited Idaho for basketball reasons; it&#8217;s not one of my five missing states. And since you asked, those are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Maine. I&#8217;ll get there yet.</p><p>&#8226;3. Everyone seems to agree that in the Big 12: Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Texas are in, Texas A&amp;M is all but in, Oklahoma State is probably in. And Kansas State is out.</p><p>And it&#8217;s the third of these that is really worth watching here at the Big 12 tournament. Let&#8217;s face it, the Big 12 tournament most years is fun to watch, but it&#8217;s pretty meaningless overall. It&#8217;s like Texas coach Rick Barnes says: &#8220;I would rather not play the conference tournament and play a round-robin schedule. To be honest with you. I&#8217;d rather do that.&#8221;</p><p>Of course he would. All the coaches would rather do that. They would rather not play an intense four-day tournament that ends just a few days before the NCAA Tournament begins. They know that winning the Big 12 tournament but losing the first week in the NCAAs would be seen by pretty much every fan as a terrible tradeoff. They know that, for all the talk that goes on about it, the conference tournament really does not hold much sway with the selection committee.</p><p>For the most part, the Big 12 tournament is like the first round of a major golf tournament: You can play your way out of the tournament, but you really can&#8217;t play your way in.</p><p>All of which brings us back to Kansas State. The Wildcats&#8217; current NCAA case is not very compelling to the bracketologists or, you suspect, the committee. Yes, Kansas State did finish with a winning record in the Big 12. Yes, the Wildcats did win 21 games a year after losing their two high-profile players. But, no, they don&#8217;t have an especially good nonconference win. They have a single victory over a top-25 team &#8212; that was at home over Missouri. Kansas State is No. 75 in most versions of the RPI, which would put them way out of the tournament.