ESPN.com’s Joe Lunardi currently has Austin Peay slated as a No. 15 seed in the upcoming 2008 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

Bracketography.com has the Governors slated as a 16 seed, while at least four other reputable sites have the Governors seeded no higher than at 15.

Which makes perfect sense.

The Governors, the favorite to win the Ohio Valley Conference regular season title back in October, have held a comfortable hold on first place throughout the season.

Austin Peay should waltz through the league tournament in early March and claim the league’s automatic NCAA tournament berth.

But head coach Dave Loos’ team shouldn’t garner higher than a 15 seed come mid-March if they are the league’s representative in the big dance.

The frank and honest reason: OVC men’s basketball is not that good.

The league has no national respect or recognition.

It’s a league that toils along unbeknownst to most of the college basketball world for four months.

Austin Peay is 17-9 overall, but has compiled a poor 4-6 non-conference record. Losses are expected at ranked Vanderbilt and at ranked Memphis. However, a 14-point loss at home against Valparaiso didn’t help them. Disregard the fact Valparaiso is 14-10 and plays in the Horizon League, a respectable mid-major conference.

The Governors should have won that game and along with a game at Evansville. But that game also resulted in a loss (72-62). Never mind that the Purple Aces are in the Missouri Valley Conference, the premier mid-major conference in the nation. Evansville has struggled to a 7-16 record in head coach Marty Simmons’ first year.

Add those two as wins and a close 71-68 loss at Utah State, and the Governors could have a 20-6 record heading into Saturday’s game against Tennessee Tech.

And they’re also looking at a much better NCAA tournament resume.

The OVC is ranked 30th out of 31 conferences in terms of RPI ratings and strength of schedule.

The conference’s combined non-conference record through Wednesday is 35-69, with an even worse mark of 8-44 on the road.

Talk about pathetic.

To make matters worse, whatever OVC team cracks its way into the 65-team field, they’ll have to defy history.

The conference hasn’t won a game in the NCAA Tournament since then-league member Middle Tennessee State, as a 13 seed, defeated No. 4 seed Florida State in the first round of the 1989 tournament.

Since the tournament started seeding teams in 1985, only once has an OVC school earned a single-digit seed (No. 9 Murray State in 1998 – and then lost 97-74 to Rhode Island).

March is the time when conferences make their influence known nation-wide. The Colonial Athletic Association (think George Mason) and the Missouri Valley Conference have done this, as in the 2006 NCAA tournament Bradley and Wichita State advanced to the Sweet 16.

What’s keeping the OVC so far behind?

Money is one aspect. According to data of the 2006-07 school year from the Office of Postsecondary Education of the United States Department of Education, all 11 OVC schools men’s basketball operating budgets, average $152,293. An operating budget is the money each program uses to divvy up among equipment, travel and recruiting expenses.

The OVC’s men’s basketball operating budgets pale in comparison to the MVC and the Colonial. The average for the 12 schools in the Colonial is $320,467 and for the MVC’s 10 schools, the number is $399,882.

Lunardi has Peay playing Texas in a first-round game. To put the money into perspective, Texas’ operating budget is a little more than $1.6 million, nearly 16 times that of Austin Peay’s budget of $103,222.

But money doesn’t necessarily win basketball games, although it does play a large difference when comparing the Austin Peay’s of the world to the Texas’.

College basketball is a game that thrives off the fan and the environment. The OVC averages 2,329 fans for its home games, while the Colonial draws an average of 3,692 fans per game and the MVC averages 7,816 fans.

Regional rivalries spark intrigue and drama into the Colonial and the MVC. The OVC, on the other hand, fails to bring to mind any rivalries of any sorts. A game between Eastern Kentucky and Murray State just doesn’t have the same sort of national appeal for the average fan like a game between Bradley and Southern Illinois-Carbondale.

Arenas speak volumes about where or what kind of Division I program a school has. Here at Eastern, Lantz Arena looks more like a high school gymnasium than where Division I basketball is played. The OVC has some solid arenas, in Murray’s Regional Special Events Center and Samford’s first-year Pete Hanna Arena.

But average attendance at these two facilities, is, like most of the arenas in the OVC, only filled to half of its capacity. Murray State’s capacity is 8,500, but averages 3,147 this season. Samford seats 5,000, but averages 1,185 this season.

None of the OVC arenas have the atmosphere of the CAA’s North Carolina-Wilmington’s dingy, poorly lit Trask Coliseum that regularly sells out because of a rabid fan base. The Coliseum can fit more a little bit more than 6,000, and the attendance is almost filled to capacity every night (5,300 average this season).

Or the appeal of the Qwest Center, Creighton’s five-year-old facility that can hold more than 17,000 for basketball. Creighton is averaging 15,773 this season. The arena is host to first-and-second round games this year in the NCAA tournament.

The NCAA tournament is one of the greatest spectacles in all of sports mainly because of the upsets early on. The OVC hasn’t played a role in this aspect in quite some time.

And this year shouldn’t be any different.

Matt Daniels can be reached at 581-7936 or at mwdaniels@eiu.edu.