MVCfans wrote:If you haven't read it yet, on The MVC Report (http://www.mvcfans.com) I offered an alternative idea to the financial incentives discussed by Elgin - just give the earmarked money to the best schools to buy better games or incentivize home-home or neutral sites games with BCS teams. Set aside 5-10% of the NCAA payout each year and make an investment in upgrading schedules which should pay off in the long run.
Couldn't disagree more with your idea (no offense). In a perfect world, yes, if the ultimate goal is to get more NCAA bids then this could work. As of right now, I think incentives will be given to teams who schedule tough MTE's. I think this is good enough.
In your scenario, you want to give money to help get better teams in our conference get better games. So this year CU and WSU would get extra cash to help this out. If they are favored again next season, the following and so on, they would continue to get extra cash. This is on a way smaller (but still important) level the same problem that teams in the Big 12 are having with the longhorn network. It would give said teams an unfair recruiting advantage and boost to their own school over other valley schools in the long run mostly keeping those teams at the top and others at the bottom. In this scenario, popular recruits to the valley would gravitate towards the top teams because of the visibility associated with those tournaments or better games they are putting together. Those top individual schools would start earning more money for themselves over the long run at the expense of the rest of the conference.
This extra cash should be earned, not awarded. You never know when a good team from the middle could have actually used that money to help them find that extra game to get them over the top for an at-large bid as well. After all, preseason predictions in the valley have never been accurate enough to do this.
I think the cash benefits for scheduling top MTE's the way it is would work much better.
As I pointed out before, 9 of the 10 teams already have MTE's because Elgin got committments from them to do so before scheduling this season. He had the discussion at their meetings which they agreed to and now he is just mandating it because its looking like a good plan due to the fact that 9-10 teams do have good MTE's. To say this is something teams are already doing would be wrong since this is the first year that they are trying to do this and looks like successfully so.
Finally, to give teams that have "realistic" at-large chances extra money screams to all 8 other teams why they should even bother scheduling tough opponents since they don't have a "realistic" shot. Might as well play a ton of cupcakes and try to duke it out in st. louis for a bid. Again, why should they do all the work to help the conference earn extra cash/bids so two teams could reap the benefits.
No thanks. gotta say no on this idea.
