C-USA Bonus Play Reactions- Ideas for Improvement

49ers Basketball Forum 🏀
1

Now that the regular season is over what were your impressions of C-USA Bonus Play?

Unfortunately this was a weak year for C-USA, especially compared to the season before when Middle Tennessee & Western Kentucky were both Top 50 in the NCAA’s metrics (then RPI). With the algorithm behind the NET remaining private, it’s impossible to know the impact of teams like Old Dominion and Southern Miss playing better opponents instead of basement teams.

There is no reason, I believe, to abandon it yet due to one fruitless season, but there are a handful of changes I think that could improve the experience and results for teams and fans alike:

  1. Regular season format: Updates are sorely needed to the Thursday/Saturday schedule we’ve all grown used to. It’s more important for fans to have some background knowledge of other teams, and sooner. Having 6 games take place over 4 hours on a Thursday night reduces visibility of the league to its own fans. There have also been Saturdays where 7 games have been crammed into unnecessarily tight time slots. Another burden is on home fans being expected to commit to two games in three days. This is burdensome for those with families, or who just wish to make other commitments.

Solution: Split the site of two travel partners (based on geography) so that, for Example, ODU & Charlotte would visit WKU & Marshall on Thursday, then host Marshall & WKU on Saturday. Also, more games need to be played on Fridays, Sundays & even Mondays. There were a few Friday/Sunday weekends in 2013-14 but hardly any since. This would increase likelyhood fans can find a C-USA game to watch more days of the week.

  1. Schedule Imbalance- In the top tier, the rigidity is warranted as the Top seed has the value of their games against the 4 & 5 seeds boosted by being road games. The rest of the structure in the Top Tier is a direct result of this. However, in the lower tiers this isn’t necessary as this system doesn’t exist to boots their profiles.

Solution: Reduce number of tiers from 3 to 2, but expand Tier 1 to the Top 6. This would maintain most of the structure up top, but also allow for more flexibility to schedule games in lower tier. This will reduce the likelihood that a team will visit an opponent twice in one season with no home game, as well as necessity for teams to play 3 times before C-USA Tournament.

2

Communication was weak around this admittedly confusing game calendar. I am pretty sure I got two emails about our last Sunday game showing that it was being played at 4:00 PM, and then there was a change to 1:00 PM. I subscribe to the AD basketball schedule on my Google calendar, so I knew about it, but I know some very good fans that come to all our games and missed it because they thought the tip was at 4:00.

3

I think we didn’t have any teams good enough to take advantage of the system this year. I would have loved to have seen this last year. I guess it was a good year to work out the kinks.

My biggest gripe with CUSA is the Thursday/Saturday thing. We get to see no other games in the league, as you said killing our own exposure. Along with that, it’s hard to go to (bad) college basketball games 2/3 days in a row multiple times a year. I understand the geographic issues facing our league, but this gets silly at times. If the geographic and economic issues are truly that great, then we need to all take a good long look in the mirror and consider a realignment with the belt. Other teams have maybe one home game a week, and in a scheduling rarity they have home games that close together. It’s consistently our schedule here, and I think that hurts our per game attendance too. People pick one of the two to go to, rather than try to attend both games. And to be fair, unless you live in U city, that’s a very logical financial decision.