It's about to be put up or shut up time for Purdue.

But first, the Big Ten Tournament.

The Boilers have one more chance to sharpen their edges and make their case to the Selection Committee before Selection Sunday this week and the beginning of March in earnest. A great conference tournament run could solidify faith in the Boilers, while an unexpected exit could push them the other way on the precarious ledge of March evaluation.

Every Monday through the rest of the season, I will share the opinions of the people and algorithms that try to predict what the committee will decide in six days when it draws up the tournament field.

This week, Purdue's predicted seed stayed mostly steady as the college basketball world gears up for tournament time.

When Purdue won 10 of its first 11 games in the Big Ten, it rocketed up projected brackets into No. 1 seed conversation. When it lost four straight, no one was sure how deep the Boilers could bottom out.

Now, a pair of convincing wins and a road loss that, while reinforcing doubts about Purdue's ability to maintain leads in the second half, was not shameful otherwise, have seemed to represent a middle ground on which to evaluate these Boilers.

According to most experts on bracketmatrix.com, it all adds up to a No. 4 seed; Purdue now averages almost exactly that among the site's 89 compiled bracket predictions.

CBS's (and Purdue's very own) Jerry Palm listed the Boilermakers as a No. 4 seed Sunday, playing in Denver the first weekend with a West (San Francisco) regional draw. ESPN's Joe Lunardi pegged the Boilers for a No. 4 seed in the Midwest (Indianapolis), seeing their first action in Seattle.

Last week, I observed that the two resume metrics I put the most stock in disagreed enough about Purdue to have the Boilers on separate seed lines – the first time that's happened since January. Well, they've come together now. The lower opinion won.

Purdue is 21st in Barttorvik's Wins Above Bubble stat, and 18th in EvanMiya's Resume Quality. Divide by four, remember the remainder, and yep, Purdue is slated to be a No. 5 seed by the metrics.

A trend reversal from the last few years could prop Purdue up enough to match what the experts think: The Boilers' efficiency stats are better than their resume this year.

They're 13th on Barttorvik and 17th on EvanMiya (14th on KenPom). The difference is that resume metrics look at games as binary and ask merely 1. Did you win or lose? 2. Who did you play? and 3. Was it home or away?

Efficiency stats ask the latter two questions, but instead of caring about wins and losses, they care about the point margin. They don't react with particular strength to close losses and close wins alike. That benefits 21-10 Purdue, which carries the nation's seventh-toughest schedule.

Purdue's Quadrant 1 record took a hit this week, falling from 8-8 to 7-9. The extra loss came in Friday's road loss to Illinois, and the disappearing win was at Rutgers in early January; the Scarlet Knights are now 76th in the NET, outside the top-75 threshold for a road Quad 1 game.

That makes Purdue 15-10 in the top two Quadrants, compared to 11-11 Arizona, 14-8 Iowa State and 13-7 Maryland among likely four seeds.

The most-discussed numerical resume system is probably the NCAA's NET Quadrants. The NET, or NCAA Evaluation Tool, ranks teams very similarly to Kenpom or other algorithmic interpreters of game results.

The Quadrant system is just a way of ranking wins and losses through the lens of the NET rankings. A Quad 1 game is a home game played against a team ranked 1-30 in the NET, a neutral court game against a team ranked 1-50 or an away contest with a top-75 opponent. Quadrants two through four are much the same, just with lower NET rankings thresholds.

The Quadrant system is easy to understand, but there are two very sound, straightforward alternatives: Barttorvik's Wins Above Bubble and EvanMiya's Resume Quality.

Those two metrics correct what can be a pretty big shortcoming of the Quadrant system: beating Auburn in Neville Arena would count the same as, say, a road win over USC .

Barttorvik and EvanMiya's stats more closely hew to the committee's process in evaluating the strength of wins not with four rigid buckets, but by assigning "points" based on impressiveness. They each estimate how likely a team on the tournament's bubble would be to win a given game, and use that likelihood to give or take credit from the teams playing it, depending on the result.

For instance, a team smack-dab right on the cutline to receive an at-large tournament bid would be expected to win 17.5 games so far if it played Purdue's schedule. The Boilermakers have 21 wins, and so possess a Resume Quality of 3.5 (wins above a bubble team).