Basketball Scheduling

[ZuluWarrior]

I looked at our future football schedules and we are loaded with great non-conference games (I'm one who believes having top tier games is a good thing - usually). If we are to ever get to a BCS Bowl Game we'll need to go undefeated and beat a Top 25 team or two and I think that should always be our goal.
What I find completely boggling is how poor our basketball schedule is every year. Now granted, our program has sucked for a decade, but I have faith one day we'll compete again like we did in the st Dakich era and where we were about to go with Jans. When that happens we should be scheduling a Top 25 road game or two and paying for one to come to the Stroh. I don't understand why we aren't. We have the worst non-conference schedule in the MAC. Wasn't the incredible gift from Mr. Frack supposed to be making that happen?

[gmartin]

Well since Dambrot is 25-2 against us maybe we will start to play Dusquene.

Would also be nice to play The U since that's where Huger came from and Coach L is still there.

[threestooges]

I, for one, would love to play Dusquene. Or Duquesne. We should contact both schools & see if one of them will play us in a home-and-home.

[footballguy51]

Until we start winning consistently against the bad teams, is it really worth trying to pay for big teams to come to our house to kill us? I would be fine with traveling to their place to lose because we'll get paid to do it. If we start winning 75% of our games, or thereabouts, I'd be okay with paying to have a high profile Big 10 or Atlantic 10 team come in because we may actually beat them and we'd be getting our money's worth.

[factman]

The problem is many of the "high profile" teams don't care about the money. They schedule to their advantage, no matter what that may be.

[hammb]

Hoops scheduling is a different animal than football scheduling, for many reasons. We've had trouble scheduling games here for as long as I can remember. I do agree that I want to see a concerted effort to schedule better games, but I'm afraid "playing some top 25 teams" isn't going to happen anytime soon. Right now those teams don't want to play us period, because we'll hurt their RPI/Public opinion. Doesn't matter how badly they beat us, playing BG at this stage is a negative for their season. When (IF?) we start putting together 20 win seasons they won't want to play us because if we actually pose a legit threat it would only be a lose/lose for them.

It takes a long time to build yourself up to a Gonzaga or Butler where a good mid-major can consistently schedule quality opponents in the OOC schedule. And even then you're almost certainly going to be going on the road or neutral sites. Look at Gonzaga they played a good OOC schedule this year, but were @Florida, @Iowa State, @Arizona, @Tennessee...their best home games were probably Washington & Akron.

Hoops schedules are also typically year to year. Yeah you have some multi year deals, but it's not like Football where the schedule is largely set in stone years in advance. As such, I think playing a lower tier OOC schedule is probably for the best right now. I would like to see us try to get at least one marquee game every year, but I'm still not sure what good that does the program to get blown out by a Cincy or MSU every season. Mostly we should be scheduling mid tier mid majors in the hopes that we can start putting together 20 win seasons. Akron, definitely should have been scheduling more ambitiously with their recent successes, but us? We're not there yet, and the fact that schedules are year to year, you can slowly work yourself up to being able to play a tougher schedule.


Right now I'm not sure how you'd greatly improve the schedule. Until we're consistently beating the crap teams we have been loading up on, I'm not sure it really matters. Good teams won't play you when you're this bad, it doesn't help them. Right now our goal should be to try and become what Akron has been the past 5+ years. Once you get to that level THEN you should start scheduling with more ambition; I'm not sure why they didn't/couldn't.

[ZuluWarrior]

thats an excellent point in terms of hurting good teams RPI's - although I would think some top tier programs wouldn't care I.e. Duke playing Toledo recently, but those are few and far between.