With the conclusion of the regular season on Saturday, the Big East conference finalized its standings, leaving only the conference tournament in New York to stand between the remaining NCAA tournament hopefuls and Selection Sunday. A few teams will receive a call no matter their fortunes at Madison Square Garden, but the stakes could hardly be higher for those teams on the cusp of selection.

Moreover, the championship is a sizable enticement in its own right, both as a matter of prestige and in regard to its winner's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. To those teams that have fallen out of the discussion for an at-large bid, that possibility looms as an incentive to go down fighting. With Wednesday's opening round tip-off creeping closer, any scenario deserves some credence - but what effect would each scenario have?

Scenario #1: Straight Chalk

This scenario follows a simple path: High seed beats low seed, all the way to the championship game. Fans hate this hypothetical, but nobody will bat an eye if No. 1 plays No. 2 for the title. 4th-seeded Providence probably stands to gain the most from this outcome, as a win over 5th seed and likely NCAA tournament team Butler would demonstrate some stability after the Friars' long fade.

If regular season champion Villanova does play runner-up Xavier in the final game, the finalists also profit immensely; not only would one or both teams secure a coveted 1-seed in one of the NCAA tourney's four regions, but the winner would have a strong case for the top overall seed. That team would face its opening Madness game in the region nearest its hometown, a true asset in the expansive tournament. Both squads are locks for top-four seed lines, but the chance at a travel-friendly regional will deter either from playing conservatively in the conference tournament.

Scenario #2: Bid-Stealing

This scenario receives a disproportionate amount of attention given its extreme rarity, but the possibility of pandemonium appeals to commentators in search of narrative. Most predictions of the NCAA field assume that the winner of each conference tournament will come from the group of teams already expected to make the field as at-large entries; if that does not happen, selection predictions quickly fall into disarray.

This allows even the worst teams a puncher's chance at the Big Dance, but usually at the expense of a few seed lines for conference rivals higher up the ladder. Of course, all bid-stealing candidates are not created equal; if a recently eliminated team such as Creighton or Marquette claims the automatic bid, the consequences to the rest of the conference will not be severe. If bottom seed St. John's wins the tournament, on the other hand - not a total impossibility, bearing in mind that the Garden is SJU's home floor - some other conference contenders face humiliation and conceivably exclusion on Selection Sunday.

Scenario #3: True Randomness

This scenario combines elements of the others, and some randomness occurs in every season. The first two scenarios have predictable effects on the selection process, because they force the NCAA's selection committee to evaluate head-to-head results: Straight chalk situations tend to confirm the opinion the committee had before the conference tournament started, and bid-stealing tends to increase conference depth at the expense of the league's elites. When results fluctuate, though, evaluating conference tournaments is a task somewhat akin to choosing between rock, paper, and scissors.

An example of this phenomenon at work: If 9th-seed DePaul manages to topple both Georgetown and Villanova, but then falls to Providence, the committee faces a quandary. On the surface, Villanova is discernibly better than Providence, and the latter is most likely better than Butler - but in this situation, both 'Nova and Providence will have a loss to DePaul while Butler will not. The Wildcats' resume is strong enough that a regional 2- or 3-seed is probably their floor, but Providence and Butler are much less certain of their positions, and any situation that forces the NCAA selectors to ask questions of either school bodes ill for both.

None of the three scenarios above completely explains the nuanced relationship between conference tournaments and the selection process, but together they offer some insight into the effect of four rounds of single elimination on the broader picture. Since the NCAA tournament also boasts a fixed field of 68, the tournaments of other conferences also have an impact outside the Big East's collective control.

With this enormous capacity for chaos in a year of parity and bubble squads, the world's most famous arena is a fitting home for the Big East tournament. In one final, perfect prelude to the Dance, all ten of the conference's teams can hit the reset on their ambitions, aspirations, and aggravations. For four days of lunacy in the City That Never Sleeps, expect jubilation and despondence to intersect in a New York minute.