Big East Scheduling Debate

More OOC games during the regular season would be nice, assuming the players/coaching staff/schools agree to playing additional games. The games can’t be at the expense of the regular conference schedule because the TV contracts won’t allow for that. Fox has negotiated for a set # of Big East games, ESPN has a set # of SEC games, etc. TV revenue is king.
 
espken said:
A
Further proof that it’s a good one
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I'm sure you'll love it when our one UConn game is at UConn, which then chooses to play it at the Garden. And our one Nova game is at Nova. And won't it be great to only play Creighton at Creighton? But hey, we will be treated to a home and home with Seton Hall and DePaul!

Besides that it inevitably skews conference standings, it is no longer an apples-to-apples comparison. We did this before when it was the Big Big East and it sucked.

The answer is not "schedule more competitive non-conference games," it's "the league needs to get stronger from top to bottom so it wins the non-conference games all of its teams play."

And there's nothing stopping St. John's or anyone else from scheduling more competitive out of conference games instead of Merrimack or whatever. Michigan State has loaded up the non-con for years.
 
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Jack Williams said:
Since we are on the topic of scheduling, I wanted to throw out this idea I have had for scheduling that I wish college basketball would adopt.

This would probably be hard to pull off logistically, but I have had a couple conversations with a friend of mine who questioned why the SEC got so much love from the committee this year. My answer was simple, they had 4-5 of the best teams in the country, and as a conference they dominated everyone else in non conference. The committee can only really make judgements off of non conference play when weighing which conferences are better, because then all teams go to play within their own conference.

My friend's reply was that he finds this to be somewhat unfair because of the portal era, teams early in the year are just beginning to gel, chemistry is building, so using the non conference portion of the schedule to determine conference strength may be flawed.

While I don't think the system is perfect, it works well enough (I don't think anyone can disagree the SEC had a hell of a year and deserved a good amount of those bids) - but I would love to see some kind of system where during conference play - there are flexed marquee "Non conference" games that occur periodically throughout January/Feb/Early March.

My thought would be, you let teams play in conference, but have a designated Saturday about 1/3rd into conference play, where maybe the top half of Big East teams in the standings take on... say the top batch of teams in the Big Ten. And the top half teams in the SEC take on the top Big 12. And every few weeks, there are another one of these designated saturdays where the conferences rotate and play each other.

To me it would give the committee a more well rounded view of how to weigh these conferences against each other when selecting the teams for the dance. Probably would never happen, but thought I'd throw it out there
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It would also make for great TV.
 
lawmanfan said:
I'm sure you'll love it when our one UConn game is at UConn, which then chooses to play it at the Garden. And our one Nova game is at Nova. And won't it be great to only play Creighton at Creighton? But hey, we will be treated to a home and home with Seton Hall and DePaul!

Besides that it inevitably skews conference standings, it is no longer an apples-to-apples comparison.

The answer is not "schedule more competitive non-conference games," it's "the league needs to get stronger from top to bottom so it wins the non-conference games all of its teams play."

And there's nothing stopping St. John's or anyone else from scheduling more competitive out of conference games instead of Merrimack or whatever. Michigan State has loaded up the non-con for years.
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Easy fix, create two divisions. Play your own division twice, and rotate playing one of the other teams twice.

*edit, upon further calculation, a 12th team would be needed (like LJSA previously mentioned) for it to work.

SJU
UConn
Nova
gtown
PC
hall

Creighton
Marquette
Xavier
Butler
DePaul
 
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espken said:
Easy fix, create two divisions. Play your own division twice, and rotate playing one of the other teams twice.

SJU
UConn
Nova
gtown
PC
hall

Creighton
Marquette
Xavier
Butler
DePaul
Click to expand...
Big East TV revenue will drop by about 70% in that scenario. I’m exaggerating, but it wouldn’t be pretty,
 
espken said:
Easy fix, create two divisions. Play your own division twice, and rotate playing one of the other teams twice.

*edit, upon further calculation, a 12th team would be needed (like LJSA) previously mentioned for it to work.

SJU
UConn
Nova
gtown
PC
hall

Creighton
Marquette
Xavier
Butler
DePaul
Click to expand...
sucks
 
Jack Williams said:
Since we are on the topic of scheduling, I wanted to throw out this idea I have had for scheduling that I wish college basketball would adopt.

This would probably be hard to pull off logistically, but I have had a couple conversations with a friend of mine who questioned why the SEC got so much love from the committee this year. My answer was simple, they had 4-5 of the best teams in the country, and as a conference they dominated everyone else in non conference. The committee can only really make judgements off of non conference play when weighing which conferences are better, because then all teams go to play within their own conference.

My friend's reply was that he finds this to be somewhat unfair because of the portal era, teams early in the year are just beginning to gel, chemistry is building, so using the non conference portion of the schedule to determine conference strength may be flawed.

While I don't think the system is perfect, it works well enough (I don't think anyone can disagree the SEC had a hell of a year and deserved a good amount of those bids) - but I would love to see some kind of system where during conference play - there are flexed marquee "Non conference" games that occur periodically throughout January/Feb/Early March.

My thought would be, you let teams play in conference, but have a designated Saturday about 1/3rd into conference play, where maybe the top half of Big East teams in the standings take on... say the top batch of teams in the Big Ten. And the top half teams in the SEC take on the top Big 12. And every few weeks, there are another one of these designated saturdays where the conferences rotate and play each other.

To me it would give the committee a more well rounded view of how to weigh these conferences against each other when selecting the teams for the dance. Probably would never happen, but thought I'd throw it out there
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LOL @ committees and rankings and all the rest of the amateur nonsense we had to tolerate for decades.

Time for the NCAA to move on and bury that model.

Eliminating pre-season rankings is a great start towards objectifying the playoff picture in professional collegiate hoops. Let teams play before affixing a number next to their name. It does more harm than good, and is a pretty stupid idea. Always has been.

Frankly, anything that does not directly address the subjectivity attached to ranking systems and tournament seeding is a major waste of everyone's time.

College hoops is a professional sport. Players make millions. Schools BEG fans for money. The least they could do is objectify things like every other professional sports league.

How they do that? Couldn't care less, so long as it is fair, and removes as much voter bias as possible.

Crazy idea, right?
 
kranmars said:
Probably time to increase the schedule by a couple of games to allow padding to add 1 or 2 mid seasons high profile non-conference games.
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Since everyone is getting a piece of pie now, why not extend to a 40 game regular season. Start season in mid October, fall classes already in session. Teams congregate in Summer anyway. Coaches and players are being well compensated, 9 more games wouldn’t hurt.
 
espken said:
Since everyone is getting a piece of pie now, why not extend to a 40 game regular season. Start season in mid October, fall classes already in session. Teams congregate in Summer anyway. Coaches and players are being well compensated, 9 more games wouldn’t hurt.
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And how about as part of those 9 games:
Big East
acc
Big Ten
SEC
Big 12
MWC

All teams in each conference play at least one team in each of the other conferences.

Update: disparity in number of teams per conference would necessitate it being only the top 11 teams per conference participate in all-conference play, and second division teams in the bigger conferences only play a limited number of crossover games. Or BE/MWC double up against the bigger conferences.
 
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