Since this article came out about the Big East’s strong play out of conference this season, the league has done nearly a complete 180, and its little brother has had a lot to do with the turnabout.

As you may remember, the Big East was an incredible 79-3 in games against opponents outside the six major conferences entering play on Dec. 4. Since the, Big East teams are 23-8. Big East teams had three losses of this sort on each day this past weekend, and Louisville and Providence have each had two such losses since Dec. 4.

As a result of this stretch of poor play — which also includes a 4-7 record against other major-conference teams — the Big East’s projected RPI has fallen from .5876 to .5801. It now comes in behind the projected RPI of the Big 12.

If you read my this piece, you’ll know about the link between a conference’s RPI and the percentage of the league that makes the NCAA Tournament. At the time of that piece, the Big East actually had an RPI that projected 10 bids. Although 10 was always unlikely, it still seemed that this would be the year that the league finally broke through the eight-bid barrier. Now, though, the mean projection of bids has dropped from 10.1 to 9.1, and 8.3 bids is within one standard deviation of the mean.

Note: RPI refers to projected conference RPI. Proj AL% is the percentage of at-large bids that the conference is likely to receive based on the conference’s RPI. Mean refers to the average number of bids that that Proj AL% would translate into. The 84th Pct and 16th Pct columns refer to how many bids each conference would get if it fell one standard deviation above or below the mean.

The last column of that chart is the change in projected bids since Dec. 4. You’ll notice that the Atlantic 10 has made the biggest positive jump, and it makes sense as half of the Big East’s eight recent losses to teams outside the major conference have been to Atlantic 10 teams.

Rhode Island, Charlotte, Temple and Xavier have all earned victories over Big East teams, giving the A-10 a real shot at four NCAA bids, which hasn’t happened since the 1997-98 season. That year, five Atlantic 10 teams — Temple, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, George Washington and Xavier — received bids. It’s perhaps fitting that three of the four losses that Big East teams suffered to Atlantic 10 teams in the last 12 days were against URI, Xavier and Temple. The other was Louisville’s loss to Charlotte, which also made the NCAAs in 1998, but as a member of Conference USA. Even if four bids is probably less than a 50/50 shot, the A-10 should have a very good chance of getting three bids for the third consecutive season.

It was probably going to take an out-of-this-world non-conference performance for the Big East to have a real shot at 10 bids, and it was always going to take something special to get a ninth bid. In less than two weeks, the Big East has gone from out-of-this-world to sort of special. There isn’t much margin for error left if Selection Sunday is to be historic.