A Recipe for Success
November 9, 2006 9:00 am by Mister DThe beginning of the college basketball season is both exhilarating and anticlimactic.
There are elements of the two weeks leading up to the season that you simply cannot top.
For instance, if you happen to be an undergrad, it’s tough to beat the excitement that is Midnight Madness (which a wise man once described as a pep rally with two added bonuses: 1) beer and 2) women who are finally legal). Until that point, it’s been an entire 6 months since you last saw a 40-minute basketball game during which you verbally threatened Jim Burr’s life.
Moreover, the season hits you unexpectedly. College basketball has no hot stove, no free agent acquisitions, no trade rumors. You don’t hear chatter on the national airwaves, save for a few reports on the occasional recruiting violations from [insert Big 10/12 School here] University. It’s nowhere near Sportscenter. You can just see Jay Bilas, reclining on a chaise in Acapulco from April to October, reading Kafka and sipping a frozen red beverage, his enormous brain thousands of miles from college bball. It’s a seasonal sport that hibernates during the summer and awakens hungry in the late fall. Compared to the ever-present nature of the NBA, MLB, and NFL, college basketball waxes to a climax in March and wanes into oblivion by the middle of April. And then, like a New England winter, it sneaks up on you in early November. We take a break, relax, rejuvenate, forget the heartbreak that ended last year’s season, and then all of a sudden you look at the calendar, and college basketball is one week away.
And then the season starts.
Bethune-Cookman. Niagara. Nicholls State. Montana A&M.
And for TWO STRAIGHT MONTHS we play these teams.
Sure, substitute Dartmouth for Bethune-Cookman. Switch Niagara with St. Francis Sister Mary’s College for the Undercoordinated. The point is this: if you’re a Big East team, you play cupcakes from November until January. End of story.
I grant you that sometimes you get an odd preseason tournament here, or a non-conference showdown there. But let’s be honest. 12 of the first 14 games of a season are near-guarantee victories.
Syracuse is notorious for this. Last year, not only did they play cupcakes, they made all of those teams travel to the Carrier Dome! Their first game in the dome was on November 8th, and the team didn’t leave the state of New York until after Christmas! They went into conference play with a 12-2 mark (having lost to Florida and err…Bucknell…).
This year? They don’t leave the state of New York until January 7th! They scheduled 11 cupcakes, and two decent out-of-conference opponents (Oklahoma St. and Wichita St.). So again, they enter Big East conference play with an 11-2 mark, at worst.
Syracuse, of course, isn’t the only one who does this. They all do it. All of the smart ones, anyway.
A few questions, though.
Could there be a bigger letdown to the start of college hoops? I don’t think so. Here we are, psyched that a new season has started, and we play Nobody College, who we’re going to whoop. And even if you wanted to view this beat-down in HD, it’s nowhere to be found on the 900 channels you have on your cable package.
Infuriating.
But can you really blame teams for setting their schedules up this way?
Think about it. The object of every program is to get into the NCAA tournament. Therefore, if you could find a way to craft a schedule that could nearly guarantee your team’s entrance to the big dance, you’d do it, right?
Teams create their cupcake-heavy schedules because it gets them into the NCAA Tourney, plain and simple. Teams in major conferences figured this out a long time ago. Consider this…imagine you’re an Athletic Director for a major Big East school, and you know the following things to be true:
1) To make it to the NCAA Tourney, your team can afford at most 11, maybe 12 losses in a season (the selection committee doesn’t like giving at-large bids to 13-loss teams, no matter what the RPI ranking may be).
2) You need to play some difficult teams to improve your strength of schedule, but you play in the Big East—so problem solved. Conference play in the Big East automatically boosts strength of schedule (which means a few good wins boosts your RPI tremendously). You have 16 of these games.
Given these two facts, here’s your formula.
1) Schedule a dozen cupcakes at the beginning of the year (12 wins), and two semi-difficult out of conference opponents (1 win, 1 loss)
2) Go at least .500 in conference play (8 wins, 8 losses), and win a game or two in the conference tournament (1 win, 1 loss).
3) And voila. Ladies and gentleman, you have just engineered a 22-10 team coming out of the Big East.
Sound like NCAA Tournament material?
You betcha. And that’s all that matters. You’re dancing.
Despite the fact that college basketball sputters at the start, I can’t argue with the logic of structuring your year in this manner. It just makes too much sense given the current system. Making it to the Dance isn’t about beating the BCS formula. It’s about showing a selection committee your “body of work,” where RPI and strength of schedule are just two of the myriad factors taken into consideration. College basketball will continue to be structured this way until the tournament selection system changes.
For now?
Bring on the Quinnipiacs and the Fairfields! Hooray for Towson, Howard, and Robert Morris! Your crappy-ass programs are footing the bill for our tickets to the big dance.
Thanks for traveling to the Carrier Dome in December…we hope you enjoy your ride home.
Oh, and be sure to watch us on CBS in March.
Categories: Commentary, Mister D
5 Responses to “A Recipe for Success”
Is that a recipe for tournament success? So much focus is put on getting bids but the Beast’s standards should always be higher.
I plan on doing some analysis of non-conference schedules last season. I think the Big East collectively played the second toughest schedule out of conference among the Big 7 (BCS + MVC) conferences.
I always found Temple’s schedule interesting in the late 90s/early 00s. Coach Chaney would always schedule the most insane preseason schedule ever. They would play 4 of the top 10 teams in the first few weeks and stay competitive with all of them (maybe winning one).
The problem is that Temple would always play down to its competition. They’d lose by 2 to Duke and then they’d get beat by St. Bonaventure. They’d end the season 15-13 and get snubbed for the Tourney again and again.
Temple kind of had to schedule some big name schools though, because the Atlantic 10 doesn’t usually give more than 2 bids, ever. But like you said, Temple usually blows it, and sometimes breaks someones arm in the process.
As for teams like Michigan State, while we honor their courage, we laugh at their stupidity. They play in a good conference and still feel they should rack up at least 4 or 5 out of conference losses. Way to think that through.
Other than watching the games, I particularly like UConn’s method. They play their tough non-conference game in January and February. So even with a young team like this, they’ll probably still be undefeated come conference play. Of course, it’s terrible to watch.
[...] Mister D’s post pointed out the well-known fact that Syracuse plays a bunch of chumps in November and December. Sure, Syracuse’s opponents are chumps — Syracuse opens up against St. Francis of New York tonight and look to whoop up on Penn or UTEP later this month. But these cupcakes are veritable giants compared to some of the other teams Big East teams are playing. Heck, at least Syracuse is playing division I opponents. Marquette opens the season against Hillsdale College. Nevermind that Hillsdale College sounds like a place high school sitcom characters go upon graduation. The real kicker is that Hillsdale is a division II team. Honestly, Marquette might as well be playing a good high school team. [...]
If you recall, despite ‘Cuse getting slammed by the media for their weak non-conference schedule at season’s start, they finished last year having played one of the most difficult schedules in the country (UConn x 2, Villanova x 2, Pitt x 2, WVU, Florida, G’town…).
So no, I don’t think playing cupcakes hurt them in the long run.
Care to comment?