By Bill Koch
The Cincinnati Enquirer

When University of Cincinnati basketball coach Bob Huggins left Fifth Third Arena early Saturday night after the Bearcats defeated Memphis to claim a share of the Conference USA championship, he believed that UC would enter this week's conference tournament with the No. 2 seed.

TOURNAMENT TIME

• Bearcats, Wildcats pad resumes • Huggins miffed by No.3 seed • UK marches into SEC play on roll TOURNAMENT PREVIEWS & BRACKETS • C-USA: A favorite? Try any of the five champs • A-10: Road to title goes through Saint Joseph's • SEC: UK, Miss. State fight for top seed • MAC: Western Michigan should take lone bid

But a few hours later, when the official seedings were released, the Bearcats were seeded third, behind the team they had just beaten.

Instead of facing the winner of Wednesday's game between No. 7 Saint Louis and No. 10 Southern Miss as the No. 2 seed, the Bearcats now have to face the winner of the game between No. 11 East Carolina and No. 6 Louisville, which is considered one of the most dangerous teams in the tournament.

The tournament is Wednesday through Saturday at U.S. Bank Arena, with the winner receiving an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

"It isn't right," Huggins said Sunday. "Don't you have to wonder if they're trying to take care of the people that are staying in the league?"

UC is among eight schools that are leaving the conference after next season. Memphis is among the schools that are staying.

DePaul, UC, Memphis, Charlotte and Alabama-Birmingham all finished in a tie for first place during the regular season. DePaul earned the No. 1 seed based on its 3-2 record against the other four schools. Charlotte dropped to No. 5 based on its 2-3 record against the other four schools.

The league adopted a new tie-breaking policy this year:To break the tie among the three teams that remained tied, "each team's record shall be compared to the team occupying the highest position in the final regular-season standings, continuing down through the standings until one team gains an advantage."

That would appear to give the edge to UC, which was 1-1 against DePaul, compared with Memphis and UAB, both of which were 0-1.

But the league didn't see it that way.

Brenda Weare, the league's deputy commissioner who serves as the men's basketball administrator, said that because five teams shared the conference championship, none of them can be considered to have "the highest position in the final regular-season standings," which means the league had to skip down to Louisville and Saint Louis, which finished tied for sixth, to begin to separate Memphis, UC and UAB.

Using that method, UAB is relegated to the No. 4 seed because it was 1-1 vs. Louisville and Saint Louis, while UC and Memphis were each 2-1.

Memphis eventually gets the edge over UC for the No. 2 seed because it was 2-0 vs. Texas Christian, while UC was only 1-0.

For tiebreaking purposes, then, the Bearcats' win over Memphis means nothing.

"The policy says going down until one team gains an advantage," said C-USA commissioner Britton Banowsky. "What it doesn't say is you go back up to a two-team tie. We've run the math out and I think we have gotten the right answer."

Weare said the ruling had nothing to do with UC's decision to leave C-USA for the Big East in 2005.

"I can assure you that absolutely had nothing to do with anything but following our tiebreaking procedure," she said.

Brian Teter, who worked as an associate commissioner and men's basketball administrator for the league for eight years before becoming associate athletic director at UC this year, was upset with the communication that UC received from the league.

"The last five days it was being universally communicated that a five-way tie would result in Cincinnati being the No. 2 seed," Teter said, "and when we found out through a fax and e-mail and not even getting a phone call, it really kind of hit us in the face."

Said Weare: "All I can say is that he did not check with me. I can't confirm what he got from other folks. ...

"We have independent verification of this. Other conferences that use this same tiebreaker, they have confirmed that they used the same tiebreaking procedure and would have come out with the same outcome."

Huggins wasn't pleased.

"She called somebody in the Big Ten and ran it by the commissioner and he said, 'OK,' " Huggins said. "What is that?"

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E-mail bkoch@enquirer.com