Who Would Win a Missouri Division 1 Basketball Tournament? [POLL]

March always is the best time of year for college basketball. While there is much attention devoted to the NCAA Basketball Tournament, there is also the National Invitation Tournament and the College Basketball Invitational. There are plenty of tournaments to go around in the post season.

One of the things I would like to see is a little in-state rivalry popup between the Missouri NCAA Division 1 teams. Can you even name the teams that fall in this category? Go ahead, I'll give you a second. I have to admit, I had to look it up to make sure I got them all.

There are the Missouri Tigers, Missouri State Bears, St. Louis Billikens, University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Kangaroos and Southeast Missouri Redhawks.

All these teams are in Missouri, and yet all of them are in different conferences and very rarely play each other. Imagine the excitement of placing all five teams on a neutral court. Each of them would be seeded and you'd have three rounds. I think it would be good to play at a Division 2 School Court, like University of Central Missouri for example.

This year, the MU Tigers played their first year in the Southeastern Conference (SEC).  They finished 22-9 and were 5th place in the conference. Missouri State was 11-22 and finished 7th in the Missouri Valley Conference. UMKC was 8-24 and ranked 7th in the Summit Conference, Southeast Missouri was 17-16 and ranked 2nd in the Ohio Valley-West Conference and St. Louis was 24-6 and ranked 1st place in the Atlantic 10.

If we seeded them according to record, we'd feature UMKC vs. Missouri State in the 1st round. The winner of that game would take on St. Louis, while Missouri would take on Southeast Missouri in the other game. Again, if we go by record, St. Louis would take on Missouri for the Missouri Championship Game. St. Louis would win that one and be crowned the Missouri championship.

However, I quickly point out that in NCAA basketball anything can happen and you have to throw records out the door, so which team do you think would win the "Missouri Five"?

For the record, I'd really like to see this happen one of these days.  Until then, don't forget to fill out your NCAA bracket for a chance to win $1 million!