People ask me about SLU and the NCAA Tournament. Are they in? What do they have to do to be in?

First, they're not in. They are 20-5. They could be, in a worst-case scenario, 20-11 on March 6. That would not get them in. Now, is it likely they finish 20-11? No. So what does it take to get in? (Or, what would it take to get them out?)

Well, they have to avoid doing anything stupid. The spot is their's to lose. A loss to Richmond or Fordham wouldn't be fatal, but even one would hurt. Two would be costly. At 23-7, and with a quarterfinal win in the league tournament, SLU would probably feel safe on Selection Sunday. Second-place in the league should make be good enough to do it. But finish third and lose in the first round? That would make you uneasy.

Bracketologist Joe Lunardi told me last week that what SLU needs is separation. If Temple and SLU are at the top of the league and everyone else is a safe distance below, that should do it. "You want to make it easy for the committee," he said.

That separation is starting to occur. Temple is alone in first, a half-game ahead of SLU, and SLU is alone in second, a game ahead of Xavier and UMass. UMass has some tough games ahead, La Salle, Xavier, Datyon and Temple. If SLU can beat Xavier on Feb. 28, that would provide more valuable separation. That game isn't a must-win, but it's a win that, if other results hold, would likely settle the deal for SLU.

It will be tough for SLU to win the league. Temple's got a half-game lead, but really it's a two-game lead because they have the tiebreaker edge. If SLU goes 5-0, Temple has to go 3-2 for SLU to win the league. If SLU goes 4-1, Temple has to go 2-3. The odds are strongly in Temple's favor. (If SLU had beaten Temple, it would have a commanding lead in the league.)

It will be interesting to see if SLU gets a conference player of the week nod on Monday. Ramone Moore of Temple may be the frontrunner with his 30 point game vs. Xavier, though SLU's two wins should warrant attention. The problem? No one was great in both games. Cody Ellis had 20 vs. St. Joe's, 0 vs. La Salle. Maybe Dwayne Evans, with 13 and 9 rebounds, has a shot. But he had two points against St. Joseph's.

It will also be interesting to see what kind of support SLU gets in the polls. I don't know that they'll jump from not getting votes to being ranked, but more people should put them on their ballot this time.

I forgot to mention in my game story this morning that La Salle had been unbeaten at home this season. In fact, it was a 14-game win streak at Tom Gola Arena.

SLU's win over La Salle certainly wasn't a classic. Rick Majerus took me to task for saying it wasn't much to look at -- "If you like pretty basketball ..." he said. I don't know that I like pretty basketball, but 37 turnovers combined doesn't get your game tape sent to the Louvre.

SLU has scored less than 60 points in three of its past five games, and won two of them. (Dayton 58-50, La Salle 59-51.) That doesn't happen very often. In the previous two seasons, SLU had three games total it won with less than 60 points, and two of them were nonconference opponents. (A 56-52 win at St. Joe's in 2010 was the only sub-60 league win.)

SLU's points per possession was .88, its defensive PPP was .76. Dayton was .73; those are two of SLU's best numbers all season.

SLU shot 36.1 percent from the field. Only in the loss at UMass did they shoot worse. I count seven missed layups or putbacks, including several by Dwayne Evans on exactly the shot he made at the end to secure the win. Majerus sort of winced again about the number of gimmes that his team misses.

SLU had a very good 20 points off turnovers. Of course, La Salle committed 20 turnovers.

"Their defense is not trying to turn you over," La Salle coch John Giannini said. "Their defense is to try to stop you from scoring. So if you force the issue and you try to do things that aren't there, you're going to have a lot of turnovers and you're probably going to lose the game. We absolutely did not take what the defense gave us."

But while SLU's defense may not be trying to turn you over, it did force La Salle into a lot of situations where it did turn the ball over. (Others, meanwhile, were just plain bad.) "We created turnovers by good defense," Majerus told me, "certainly not because of our quickness."

As I was leaving the arena, I walked past the team bus and assistant coach Chris Harriman jumped off. "Tom," he said, "10 of 12 at the free throw line!" Indeed they did. There weren't a lot of real high pressure free throws in the game -- six of SLU's 12 came in the final 20 seconds with a five-point or bigger lead -- but the game was close throughout and every point counted.

Here are SLU's opponents field goal percentages in the past three games -- 24.6, 39.2, 40.0.

The time of the game, by the way, was about 1 hour, 45 minutes. Very few fouls, no TV sped things up, which was great for me (see below).

Majerus thought Kwamain Mitchell played well on both sides of the ball. He played the entire second half and was a game-best +11 in 36 minutes. He's had 12 points in each of his past three games and while his turnover numbers are creeping up -- ths was his third straight game with at least three -- he did well defensively and had four steals.

Majerus also specifically singled out Kyle Cassity's defense. That's telling because Cassity didn't provide much offensively (zero points for the fourth time in seven games). He didn't play much in the second half, just 3 minutes, as Majerus went with Mitchell, Mike McCall, Evans, Brian Conklin and either Cory Remekun or Cody Ellis the final 10 minutes of the game.

I asked Dwayne Evans if he thought of taking that rebound with 38 seconds back out and taking time off the clock rather than shooting right away, especially considering he'd missed a bunch of similar shots earlier in the game. "When I get a rebound in there it's going up the majority of the time." he said. "That thought didn't really cross my mind, nor does it ever. I'm just trying to finish the play." Evans said that after his slow start, he let his rebounding generate his offense and eventually his offense came around. That was his fifth double-double. matching his total as a freshman. Willie Reed had eight double-doubles his sophomore season. Evans was +4 in 33 minutes. He took 17 shots, which is the most by a Billiken since Mitchell took 18 at La Salle two years ago.

Conklin had another rough shooting game, making 4 of 12, and he took more 15-footers today than he normally does. If he'd had made a 3-point shot, he'd have had a non-zero number in every column of the stat sheet, a box score stuffer. He was +5 in 33 minutes.

The over-under for minutes for this game for Rob Loe had been set at 12, but he had 10 in the first half, in large part because Cody Ellis was in foul trouble and Majerus needed another big. He ended up playing 15 minutes, and then New Zealand's women's soccer team almost beat the U.S. He was 1 for 5 on 3's, making him 4 for 16 in the past four games. But I think the thing for Loe is that he's getting open to take those shots. As we've seen with Ellis, they'll come around eventually. Getting open to take them is a good sign. Most of his 3's were open looks.

Jordair Jett didn't stand out much in Philadelphia, at least to me. Majerus praised his defense at La Salle, but he played only 13 minutes and didn't score. He was even for the game.

Mike McCall earned a seat on the bench in the second half where he turned the ball over on consecutive possessions and then took a really bad shot. He heard it from Majerus on the way to the bench, and I wasn't sure if he'd be getting much playing time again, but he did. He had 11 pointns in 30 minutes, hit two clutch 3's, including the one that broke the tie and put SLU ahead to stay. "I'm proud of Mike," Majerus said. "I took Mike out and was really upset with him. I told him to get back in there, and he responded. He had been playing the best defense of our guards till today."

Cody Ellis never found his rhythm. Three days after making 6 of 9 3's, he went 0 for 4 (0 for 5 overall). He played just 10 minutes because of first-half foul trouble and had two turnovers. He was +5.

As I was waiting outside the SLU locker room after the game, I could hear the applause inside as Cory Remekun was told to come out and talk to me. Some of it was good-natured ribbing, it's the first time this season anyone's asked to talk to Remekun, but the guys also felt good for him. There have been some tough stretches of this season for Remekun, but the coaching staff has stuck with him, even if in a few games he hasn't played at all in the second half. SLU may not need good games from Remekun every night, but there will be occasions like Saturday's -- and the season-ending Duquesne game may be another -- where they'll need him to make a contribution. He seems to do better in games where the opponent plays a faster, more athletic game. One thing that got everyone's attention was his first half dunk as he reached over La Salle's Steve Zack to jam the ball home. "He's the most athletic guy I've probably seen in my life," Evans said. "That dunk was nothing new to me. I see that every day in practice." He was +5 in 19 minutes.

 LIFE ON THE ROAD

The highlight of Friday, which was mostly spent working in my hotel room, was going to see Harvard play Penn at the Palestra. I can't stress this enough: If you ever get a chance to see a game at the Palestra, do it. It's a marvelous venue, old but not antiquated and dripping with history. It feels like the whole place is naturally sepia-toned. A Philadelphia colleague told me the worst thing the Atlantic 10 ever did was move the conference tournament out of the Palestra. Yes, the closest parking is about 3 blocks away and I'm sure the locker room facilities are lacking, but it's just a great place to watch a game.

And this game was a good one because, with Harvard coming in, the crowd was a near-capacity of 7,000. I got there about 45 minutes early to pick up our tickets (I went with Bob Ramsey and Earl Austin Jr.) and the line had about 20 people in it. By the time Bob and Earl got there about 10 minutes before the game, the line stretched for a block. For the first half, we sat in our assigned seats, which were in a corner about 8 rows up in the second level, amid Penn students. Most of the seating at the Palestra is bleachers, so people get wedged in tight. For the second, we decided to move higher in the stands to one of the few unoccupied sections where we had a wide view of the court and more room to stretch out and talk. Again, it was a great experience, and I'm glad I went.

Other than eating breakfast, I didn't do anything Saturday until going to the game. Let me say this about La Salle -- you have to want to go to a La Salle game. The campus is located a bit north of Center City, as Philadelphians call their downtown, and to get there, you drive through some really crummy parts of town. I mean really crummy. Then there's a park which sort of insulates the campus, and then you get to La Salle. (Think of it as SLU without Fr. Biondi.)

Tom Gola Arena, as I've said before, is no great shakes. It's on the top floor of the school's rec center, and it's pretty much just a big open space with movable bleachers on either side and nothing behind the baskets. I think it's possible if one of the doors was open, the ball could roll out and go down a flight of stairs. The locker rooms are in the basement, so the visiting team gets to use a small room off the court at halftime. (I talked to Majerus postgame as he sat in a folding chair under the bleachers.) They've spruced the place up a bit with videoboards and banners, but really, there's less atmosphere there than any place in the A-10. And again, because of where it is, you have to want to go there to see the game.

Game time was 2 p.m. and, having spent four days in Philadelphia, I was eager to go home, so I'd booked myself on a 6:15 flight out, which was pretty much the last flight I could take all day that would get me home. If the game ended at 4 p.m. and the postgame went smoothly, I should make the flight with little trouble. If there was overtime, or if Majerus had a long session with the players afterwards, it could get dicey. It would also be dicey if the weather got messy and the roads got bad. SLU had decided not to chance it and stayed over Saturday night -- they don't travel as lightly as I do, so it takes them a bit longer -- but I felt it worth the risk.

Mercifully the game had so few fouls that it ended at 3:45, the quickest game SLU had played this season. Majerus was out of the locker room and practically waiting for me by the time I got cross court. I went downstairs to talk to players and by 4:15, I was headed to my car. Fans had started leaving the arena when Evans had put in the rebound, and I soon found out why. Half an hour after the game, the one-lane roads that lead from campus back to the highway were crawling along, and it had started to snow lightly. It took me about 45 minutes to get to the airport -- the trip over had taken about 30.

One of the big developments in Philadelphia since I was last here was the construction of a gas station near the airport. It used to be the closest station was about 3 miles from the airport. Now, maybe a quarter mile. Wawa, I thank you. I'll add that the same rental car agent who said I should get a bigger car or buy insurance because the weather was going to be terrible also said I should pay for a full tank of gas in advance because with the amount of driving I was doing, I'd use a tank. Uh, not quite. I used a little less than a half tank. Sorry Joe. Had I had more time, when the guy who checked my car back in asked how the customer service was, I've told him. Instead, I'm writing about it.

Of course, if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that, so far, I hadn't actually written a story. I quickly transcribed my interviews at the airport and then wrote the story while flying from Philadelphia to Atlanta. I filed from the Atlanta airport, grabbed a quick bite to eat, and then flew home. We landed in St. Louis about 11 p.m. It was good to be home.

Did I mention I liked the Palestra?