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Scheduling is everything

Ron Mexico

By Ron Mexico
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49r

49r

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, Handy Johnson said:

If you would've told every board member when the season started we'd finish 4th in the B1G with a 13- 5 record and NOT make the Tournament, there isn't one single person who would've believed you. Not one.

 

This is true.  I would have said 5 seed minimum.  Then asked that poster what they were smoking to think we'd go 13-5 and can I have some.

Edited by 49r
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nustudent
nustudent

This is my issue.  Stop with the hub bub about evaluation.   There were certain teams (Nebraska being one) that were never truly under evaluation, because they based it on one or two measures.  

Handy Johnson
Handy Johnson

If you would've told every board member when the season started we'd finish 4th in the B1G with a 13- 5 record and NOT make the Tournament, there isn't one single person who would've believed you. Not

ladyhusker
ladyhusker

This is partly right. Had we beaten UCF but lost to WV, we get St. Johns. Our SOS improves from 95 to 81. Had we beaten WV somehow, we get Missouri. Our SOS improves another four points to 77. Be

Ron Mexico

Ron Mexico

Posted
  • Author
Posted
13 minutes ago, Dead Dog Alley said:

 

The selection criteria this year proves that going to 20 conference games is a bad idea - the overall RPI of the league is established by the non-conference schedule, the conference slate is a wash.  If you're a coach who looks at his conference schedule and thinks his ceiling is 9-11 or 8-12, is he going to make his non-conference schedule tougher so that he might go sub .500 overall?  Or will he keep the easier games and drop one of the tougher ones he otherwise would have played.

5 teams with losing conference records made the tournament. The game is about building up your non-con RPI and then just trade victories so you can end up with 6 Q1 victories. Who you lose too or how you play doesn't matter so long as you have the requisite Q1 wins. 6 Q1 wins and 18 or so wins and you are a lock for the NCAA.

hskr4life

hskr4life

Posted
Posted
15 minutes ago, 49r said:

 

This is true.  I would have said 5 seed minimum.  Then asked that poster what they were smoking to think we'd go 13-5 and can I have some.

 

Take it a s step further... 13-5.... 5 seed NIT

Silverbacked1

Silverbacked1

Posted
Posted

Okay just a question, is this a way for the NCAA to trim down the 300+ basketball teams without actually tells some conferences that they are gone? If it hurts a school so much to play the SWAC teams and the others kind of like them. Then the larger schools woun't play them and they won't be able to play money games. That will in turn cause them to either have to cut teams from their programs, or go to a only playing other low level conference schools. Is this a plan by the NCAA to make basketball into a two or three levels of basketball. Thus making it so that there is then 5 divisions for basketball? D1, whatever, whatever, D2, D3. Just because I love reading about conspiracy theories.

throwback

throwback

Posted
Posted
18 minutes ago, Dead Dog Alley said:

 

The selection criteria this year proves that going to 20 conference games is a bad idea - the overall RPI of the league is established by the non-conference schedule, the conference slate is a wash.  If you're a coach who looks at his conference schedule and thinks his ceiling is 9-11 or 8-12, is he going to make his non-conference schedule tougher so that he might go sub .500 overall?  Or will he keep the easier games and drop one of the tougher ones he otherwise would have played.

Right. And this is the potential problem. Everybody needs X number of home games for budgeting. We've usually been at 17 lately - 16 last season.

 

Now that we add a 10th league home game and a 10th league road game, do you make up for that extra league road game by maintaining a home and home with teams like Kansas and Creighton, or do you give up the Kansas-type series to get another home game, meaning you schedule a buy game.

 

Now the plus side to 20 league games is it takes some of the randomness out of your league strength of schedule. And I understand the idea of wanting to play your league more.

 

But with such huge leagues now, I'm not sure you can ever find enough league games to truly take the randomness of the single-plays out of your schedule, so I think you're better off with 2 more non-con games where you can control things a bit better.

 

Not to mention you've got the ACC & BE challenges, which may give you a home game, might not, may not even play in it - you don't really know.

 

So basically, the B1G is going to control 21 or 22 of your 29-31 game schedule. That leaves you 8-10 games to pick up on your own. Almost certainly 5-6 of them have to be buy games. You've got Creighton. Now you're down to 3-4 more games that you can actually go out and try to strengthen your own schedule. 

 

I'd guess we're going to start asking that the CU games counts as our Gavitt Game at some point soon, just to give us a bit more flexibility. Or down the road you play another one of these 2-game neutral site tourneys in KC and see if CU would play us there for one of the games. Have to get creative.

 

Non-con scheduling just gets really tough with 20 league games. If you're going to play 20, you better hope your league doesn't have a down year like this one ever again, or it's going to cost you spots on Selection Sunday.

*Deleted Account*

*Deleted Account*

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, TomEadesSucks said:

The middle that had a team beat Michigan by 20, PSU beat OSU times, Maryland a 70% to make the tourney if they beat us a home, Wisconsin beating Purdue, Illinois beating Mizzou and competing in nearly every game? Really, we shpuld just play the non conference games and determine the bids from each conference based on the RPI after that. No need to play conference games if 8-10 teams can just beat each other and swap SOS and RPI.

Fantastic point. How about the ACC and Big East challenges being poorly seeded given that Nebraska and PSU were the 5th and 6th best teams but played the bottom instead of getting a middle team. What if Nebraska had played FSU at home instead of Boston college or Penn state played NC State at home instead of on the road. Hell, Penn State wasn't in the Big East challenge. This then created unbalance for the B10 which led to a perception prolem.  Basically, the conference office totally dropped the ball with scheduling and royally screwed PSU and Nebraska albeit unintentionally. 

*Deleted Account*

*Deleted Account*

Posted
Posted
8 minutes ago, throwback said:

Right. And this is the potential problem. Everybody needs X number of home games for budgeting. We've usually been at 17 lately - 16 last season.

 

Now that we add a 10th league home game and a 10th league road game, do you make up for that extra league road game by maintaining a home and home with teams like Kansas and Creighton, or do you give up the Kansas-type series to get another home game, meaning you schedule a buy game.

 

Now the plus side to 20 league games is it takes some of the randomness out of your league strength of schedule. And I understand the idea of wanting to play your league more.

 

But with such huge leagues now, I'm not sure you can ever find enough league games to truly take the randomness of the single-plays out of your schedule, so I think you're better off with 2 more non-con games where you can control things a bit better.

 

Not to mention you've got the ACC & BE challenges, which may give you a home game, might not, may not even play in it - you don't really know.

 

So basically, the B1G is going to control 21 or 22 of your 29-31 game schedule. That leaves you 8-10 games to pick up on your own. Almost certainly 5-6 of them have to be buy games. You've got Creighton. Now you're down to 3-4 more games that you can actually go out and try to strengthen your own schedule. 

 

I'd guess we're going to start asking that the CU games counts as our Gavitt Game at some point soon, just to give us a bit more flexibility. Or down the road you play another one of these 2-game neutral site tourneys in KC and see if CU would play us there for one of the games. Have to get creative.

 

Non-con scheduling just gets really tough with 20 league games. If you're going to play 20, you better hope your league doesn't have a down year like this one ever again, or it's going to cost you spots on Selection Sunday.

Another reason why I posted this thread regarding Creighton. It's a duplicate game like this year's that screwed Nebraska. Who else plays 2 middle of the pack Big East teams on the road. Just stupid. 

TZAHL

TZAHL

Posted
Posted
35 minutes ago, Silverbacked1 said:

Okay just a question, is this a way for the NCAA to trim down the 300+ basketball teams without actually tells some conferences that they are gone? If it hurts a school so much to play the SWAC teams and the others kind of like them. Then the larger schools woun't play them and they won't be able to play money games. That will in turn cause them to either have to cut teams from their programs, or go to a only playing other low level conference schools. Is this a plan by the NCAA to make basketball into a two or three levels of basketball. Thus making it so that there is then 5 divisions for basketball? D1, whatever, whatever, D2, D3. Just because I love reading about conspiracy theories.

Can’t you just take the lowest 3 wins off or rpi ranking?  They do it with d-2 opponents. Why not the Deleware States of the world. 

 

 

throwback

throwback

Posted
Posted (edited)

I don't think the intention of our schedule was that bad - we just caught a lot of tough breaks.

 

Just for comparison, here's Purdue's non-con this year: (selected them as they had the highest NCAA seed out of the B1G and their schedule was organized a lot like ours with a neutral tourney & both BE and ACC challenge games)

  • 7 buy games
  • 3-game neutral tourney - Tennessee (L), W Ky (L), Ariz (W) - and remember Tennessee was picked like 11th in the SEC this year
  • BE challenge Marquette (W)
  • ACC challenge L'ville (W)
  • in-state game Butler (W)

Obviously a better schedule than ours, but they only played 3 NCAA teams, plus a couple bubble teams - their 2 bubble teams weren't their choice though, they were handed to them by the B1G.

 

We played 2 NCAA teams and it would've been 3 if we beat UCF as we'd have drawn W Va

  • We played 6 buy games
  • Kansas
  • Our 3-game tourney wasn't as quality, although if we had beaten UCF, it would've been better
  • We were given who we got in the BE and ACC games
  • In-state game Creighton

They got very lucky that Tennessee played way over their expected rank and that Arizona fell to them in the 7th-place game of that tournament.

 

So in the games where they chose who to play, they didn't really play a much different schedule than we did. 

 

To their credit, they took advantage of some scheduling breaks with Tennessee and Arizona and who the B1G gave them in the challenge games, won some big games, and turned it into a #2 seed with a strong league performance. We didn't do enough with the chances we had. 

 

But as far as who they chose to play versus who we chose to play in the non-con, not that different.

 

And when you consider they are a senior-loaded team that spent the summer playing in the University Games, while we had a host of newcomers and didn't even know if Cope would be able to play till mid-December when we set the non-con schedule, we either scheduled over what we should have with the games we controlled, or they scheduled way under.

 

Edited by throwback
TZAHL

TZAHL

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, HuskerFever said:

 

We had plenty of chances. Purdue, Michigan st and Ohio st on the road. ? 

 

if we had 15 chances do you think we are 22-10 13-5 or would our record look more like 17-15 9-9?  And would that have gotten us in if we go 6-9 in those 15 games?

Ron Mexico

Ron Mexico

Posted
  • Author
Posted
50 minutes ago, TZAHL said:

We had plenty of chances. Purdue, Michigan st and Ohio st on the road. ? 

 

if we had 15 chances do you think we are 22-10 13-5 or would our record look more like 17-15 9-9?  And would that have gotten us in if we go 6-9 in those 15 games?

We would have been more of bubble team with the later than we were with the former.

tjp21

tjp21

Posted
Posted

Just jumping in here.  Haven't had much to say this evening.  I don't think our scheduling was the problem at all.  The UCF loss killed us bc of how it affected our schedule but other than that I don't really have any issues with the schedule.

 

What this year proved to me is how important it is for your conference to perform in the non con. I'll be cheering like hell for other Big 10 teams next year.  Between the unbalanced schedule and the way most of the conference performed out of conference we didn't stand much of a chance unless we would have nearly won the league.

 

If you can get to league play with a good conference RPI you'll get enough Q1 opportunities to get in by playing .500 ball in conference. 

 

What screwed us us this year was Minnesota (injuries/suspensions), NW, Iowa, Wisc, Indiana, and Maryland not being nearly as good as they were expected to be or historically are.  If just our road wins at Minny, NW, and Wisc were Q1 wins we probably get in.

tcp

tcp

Posted
Posted

screw all this crap! let's just frigging play Duke at Cameron once a week for two months and wrap up a guaranteed 4 seed!----Sincerely, Blutto Blutarsky.

 

ladyhusker

ladyhusker

Posted
Posted

Of course, even if we had beaten UCF, we get West Virginia. Considering how they were playing at the time (they demolished UCF) I don't think we win that. So we get another opportunity but realistically we lose that one. Then we get St. John's again, at full strength. Even if we win that, it's still not a Quad 1, and neither is UCF (despite being in Orlando, it's still a neutral site). Our SOS jumps 16 points but we add another tough loss. So unless we pulled out a miracle against WV, we're just talking about at least one more tough loss, and maybe two.

Honestly, considering how it all shook out, it feels like we probably would have had to win vs KU, UCF, WV AND @Creighton to be in (which would only be 3 Q1 wins + our 1 vs Michigan...not sure how Minnesota wound up factoring in). Or beat Kansas and/or Creighton AND at least one (for bubble status, probably two to be a lock) of Mich State, Purdue, and Ohio State plus our Michigan win. Either of those situations would be tall order for anyone.

Of course on the flip side we could apparently lose to our usual December cupcake and if we won those big ones, it wouldn't matter. "Winning the ones you're supposed to" is apparently not nearly as big a deal as some blue-clad ADs may have suggested. (Or maybe I'm just still bitter.)

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

AuroranHusker

AuroranHusker

Posted
Posted (edited)
24 minutes ago, ladyhusker said:

Of course, even if we had beaten UCF, we get West Virginia. Considering how they were playing at the time (they demolished UCF) I don't think we win that. So we get another opportunity but realistically we lose that one. Then we get St. John's again, at full strength. Even if we win that, it's still not a Quad 1, and neither is UCF (despite being in Orlando, it's still a neutral site). Our SOS jumps 16 points but we add another tough loss. So unless we pulled out a miracle against WV, we're just talking about at least one more tough loss, and maybe two.

Honestly, considering how it all shook out, it feels like we probably would have had to win vs KU, UCF, WV AND @Creighton to be in (which would only be 3 Q1 wins + our 1 vs Michigan...not sure how Minnesota wound up factoring in). Or beat Kansas and/or Creighton AND at least one (for bubble status, probably two to be a lock) of Mich State, Purdue, and Ohio State plus our Michigan win. Either of those situations would be tall order for anyone.

Of course on the flip side we could apparently lose to our usual December cupcake and if we won those big ones, it wouldn't matter. "Winning the ones you're supposed to" is apparently not nearly as big a deal as some blue-clad ADs may have suggested. (Or maybe I'm just still bitter.)

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
 

 

That pretty much sums it up. I am genuinely not certain this committee understood what not-great-yet-still-good basketball being played across the Midwest conferences actually looks like. The Big Ten teams has a few great teams combined with the rest playing good-to-average basketball & many of those battles were only seen on BTN, while some other leagues have a real crap-shoot of great, a few average-to-good & then quite a bit of rather average to not-so-good teams but their games are highlighted *nightly* on ESPN et al. I really do think that the overall exposure is a real factor in this.

 

 

 

Edited by AuroranHusker
Ron Mexico

Ron Mexico

Posted
  • Author
Posted
7 hours ago, ladyhusker said:

Of course on the flip side we could apparently lose to our usual December cupcake and if we won those big ones, it wouldn't matter. "Winning the ones you're supposed to" is apparently not nearly as big a deal as some blue-clad ADs may have suggested. (Or maybe I'm just still bitter.)
 

 

You may be bitter, I know that I am, but you are also spot on.

It's not about who you lose too and it's not even about who you beat but rather what quadrant the team you beat occupies.

Exhibit A: Syracuse

STRENGTH OF SCHEDULE AND RPI
  HOME AWAY NEUTRAL SOS SOS RANK RPI RPI RANK
All Division I games (20-13) 14-5 4-6 2-2 0.5852 17 0.5778 45
Non-conference D-1 games (11-2) 9-1 1-0 1-1 0.5800 15 0.6250 14
RECORD VS. TEAMS RANKED 1-50 (4-7)
WINS
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
10
Mar. 3
Home
Clemson
55-52
26
Dec. 19
Home
Buffalo
81-74
28
Feb. 17
Away
Miami (Fla.)
62-55
38
Feb. 5
Away
Louisville
78-73
LOSSES
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
1
Jan. 9
Away
Virginia
61-68
1
Feb. 3
Home
Virginia
44-59
4
Feb. 21
Home
North Carolina
74-78
4
Mar. 7
Neutral
North Carolina
59-78
5
Dec. 2
Neutral
Kansas
60-76
6
Feb. 24
Away
Duke
44-60
24
Dec. 22
Home
St. Bonaventure
57-60
RECORD VS. TEAMS RANKED 51-100 (4-4)
WINS
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
62
Dec. 31
Home
Virginia Tech
68-56
74
Nov. 27
Home
Maryland
72-70
75
Nov. 22
Home
Toledo
72-64
95
Jan. 24
Home
Boston College
81-63
LOSSES
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
54
Jan. 13
Away
Florida State
90-101
64
Feb. 14
Home
NC State
70-74
70
Jan. 6
Home
Notre Dame
49-51
95
Feb. 28
Away
Boston College
70-85
RECORD VS. TEAMS RANKED 101-200 (8-2)
WINS
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
108
Nov. 14
Home
Iona
71-62
115
Dec. 27
Home
Eastern Michigan
62-47
120
Dec. 5
Neutral
Connecticut
72-63
158
Feb. 11
Home
Wake Forest
78-70
158
Mar. 6
Neutral
Wake Forest
73-64
164
Dec. 16
Away
Georgetown
86-79
182
Nov. 20
Home
Oakland
74-50
188
Dec. 9
Home
Colgate
72-58
LOSSES
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
158
Jan. 3
Away
Wake Forest
67-73
160
Jan. 31
Away
Georgia Tech
51-55
RECORD VS. TEAMS RANKED 201-PLUS (4-0)
WINS
RANK DATE SITE OPPONENT SCORE
219
Jan. 16
Home
Pittsburgh
59-45
219
Jan. 27
Away
Pittsburgh
60-55
222
Nov. 18
Home
Texas Southern
80-67
247
Nov. 10
Home
Cornell
77-45
LOSSES

 

Handy Johnson

Handy Johnson

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, Ron Mexico said:

Compare our record to OU and the look very similar, until you look at Q1 wins.

Does OU get in without Tre' Young on the roster? Remember they're selling a TV show, and the first word in show business is "show."

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