The Mountain West Conference is deeper and stronger in men's basketball than ever before, the thinking goes.

The league has never had more than three teams make the NCAA Tournament in its 10-year history, but it is talking about getting four this year.

That's partly because there is a clear line between the haves and the have-nots this season. When it comes to lining up your NCAA bid candidates, you don't want your cellar-dwellers knocking off your heavyweights.

"As a league, we would love to see four [make the tournament]," UNLV coach Lon Kruger said. "Very definitely there are four or five teams capable of playing in the NCAA tournament and winning games in the NCAA tournament, but not all those teams will get an opportunity, probably. ... A lot depends on how other conference tournaments break out and [whether there are] surprise winners. A lot remains to be seen in the next few weeks."

Before Wednesday night's three games, the top five teams in the league -- Utah, San Diego State, New Mexico, BYU and UNLV -- were a combined 26-3 against the bottom four: Wyoming, TCU, Colorado State and Air Force.

Longtime observers say the bottom of the league is better this year -- evidenced by Colorado State and TCU both beating UNLV and Wyoming beating SDSU -- but there is no question that the five teams with rating percentage index in the top 100 are benefiting a bit from the clear delineation of power in the league.

Pat Forde of ESPN.com has noticed, writing earlier this week that "the league that has cleverly hidden itself from national audiences is having an intriguing season in obscurity." He noted that the league's "Big Five" were all between 16 and 19 wins heading into this week's games.

Four of those teams have RPIs in the top 56: No. 11 Utah, No. 32 BYU, No. 45 San Diego State and No. 56 UNLV.

How they pick POW

It's not often that the league's selection of its Player of the Week honor gets much attention, but it was brought into focus a bit Monday when Utah's Shaun Green won the award after averaging 17 points, 6.5 rebounds and 2.5 steals in wins last week over San Diego State and Air Force. He shot 63 percent from the field and 46 percent on his three-point attempts.

Some folks believed that BYU's Jonathan Tavernari should have won or shared the honor because he averaged 20 points, 8.5 rebounds and 0.5 steals in the Cougars' two wins. He shot 67 percent from the field and 70 percent from three-point range.

Kim Melcher, director of communications for the MWC, said each school nominates one student-athlete each week, and then they are voted on by the members of the MWC communications staff.

"The [staff] takes this responsibility very seriously and gives due consideration to each of the nominees submitted," Melcher said.

She said the criteria used to select the players are weighed differently by each staff member, but that some of the criteria are individual impact on game(s), outstanding individual performance, competition level, consistency of play, whether the game was at home or on the road and whether the individual went above and beyond his or her normal statistical output.