CUSA MBB Scheduling article - good read

Give one position on the selection committee per conference. If you have 34 conferences, that’s 34 people, with 7 of them from P5 & Big East & A-10. Those 27 committee members could demand fairness by voting for mid majors into the Tourney.

Another way, comparing how you do vs RPI. If you have a 45 RPI vs a 3 schedule, that’s -42. If you have a 250 RPI vs a 300 schedule, that’s +50. You can’t help your level of competition, only how you perform against it.

clt says let’s set up fake classes to allow non eligible athletes to play b-ball and fb all.

No that is too absurd. Would never happen.

The problem with the RPI formula was it was 25% your record and 75% the record of your opponents (and their opponents). They created a huge bias towards SOS which in turn creates a huge bias towards home teams (eg Syracuse never leaving their home court til conference play) and therefore the so called power leagues.

I’m all for building a better metric / mousetrap that shifts more emphasis towards winning games, which will allow a 26 win CUSA team to make the field over a 14-14 power league team (just typing that sentence is ridiculous - why is this even a debate? Its about winning games, not just who you play - and Jay Bilas is an idiot schill for suggesting who you play is more important than winning games).

HOWEVER, huge caveat here - the last time some fairness was introduced to the metric (RPI) - a tweak to just 25% of the formula rewarding road wins more than home wins, really just window dressing, in 2005, the NCAA immediately de-emphasized the RPI because it had 6 MVC teams in the mix for at large bids, and they cant have that s***. The NCAA tournament is just a glorified revenue share for the big boys and allowing more seats at the table for the mid majors is a no-no, NO MATTER HOW MANY GAMES THEY WIN AND HOW MUCH THEY HAVE TO TRAVEL TO DO SO (another absurd concept).

So why the rant? Simple. It is pointless to design a better / actually more fair metric, if the committee is just going to ignore it or use it selectively when it helps their cause to give money and exposure to the power league dregs. I suggest what you have to do is to get the power leagues to buy in to a blind, impartial metric that just may end up putting a program like La Tech (and say 25 wins) in over a 6th place SEC team. The metric has to be fair and not selectively applied or its pointless. Doing this would fix a good deal of what is wrong with college basketball.

Of course, I have had ideas that will never ever be implemented for what would fix CFB too. And I thought that UNC Cheats actions were so egregious that they couldn’t be overlooked. So what the f*** do I know. Greed and corruption will almost assuredly continue to rule until these assholes kill college sports altogether. Same as it ever was.

The A10 did improve its conference RPI by changing its scheduling policy. I’d like to see CUSA do something similar although it will be harder because many CUSA schools are located in less populated areas so scheduling is tougher.

I am encouraged that C-USA has hired Mark Adams as a consultant. The first step to fixing the problem is admitting you have one.

David Teel of the Daily Press in Newport News with his take on the subject. Also a good read.

Dailypress.com: C-USA basketball mulling radical schedule overhaul

The A10 actually only did the tiered based scheduling for one season, which happened to be a season several teams rebounded from lulls. I’d say the cannibalization could have actually cost us bids that season.

Latest…

http://www.herald-dispatch.com/sports/marshall_sports/chuck-landon-c-usa-making-big-moves-in-hoops/article_dad0483a-c987-5b60-9041-bfc87418accd.html

The A10 had a similar schedule last year. The coaches agreed who were the best teams and they played each other twice. It worked out that the 3 teams that had been predicted to be the best were the top 3. They met in the semi-finals and finals of the tournament., too

Davidson won the tournament and was given the automatic bid. Rhode Island received an at large bid that was no surprise. St. Bonaventure also received an at-large bid to a play-in game. 2 or 3 weeks before Selection Sunday many prognosticators said the A10 was a one bid league. It helps when your best schools play each other often and down the stretch.

Deadspin: Conference USA Is Completely Revamping Its Conference Schedule Setup And It’s Just Brilliant.

via Google News

No idea if this strategy will pay any dividends, but I’m very encouraged by the fact that the conference is willing to make such a bold change and see what happens.

Kind of what I was thinking. The problem is it could mean two or 3 extra losses for you 2nd or 3rd place team, which could ultimately knock them out instead of of pushing them in. But hey, what they’re doing now isn’t really working, so…

Chad Bishop clarified something for me that may have been misquoted in Chuck Landon’s piece as concerns the number of league matchups.

Anyway, each C-USA team would play 14 games - one each versus a dozen conference foes and two (home and away) against a designated travel partner - before the re-seeding would occur for the final four regular season contests. (For the Niners, Old Dominion has been the travel partner.)

Not sure I would want to play the same team 4 times - assuming Niners and Monarchs would face each other again after re-seeding and then once more in the C-USA tournament. Hmm…

http://www.wbko.com/content/sports/Conference-USA-changing-mens-basketball-scheduling-format-483950131.html

Official announcement:

clt says deadpsin is fake news

After mostly laudatory reports, a different point of view.

I get the pessimism and this guy is probably right, but unless there is something else these conferences can do to garauntee a fairer shake from the selection committee, then you just have to try something. The numbers say it can’t make things worse, so why not?

clt says Wilbon hated it on pti…so you know it is a good idea

If it is getting press and discussion in the sports media then it has already been a success. The more people that talk about the game being rigged by the P5, the better.