Valley looking to improve scheduling - new Bracketbusters?

[TheAsianSensation]

I don't see the problem with a BB similar arrangement IF it's limited to the top teams. Whether teams knock on the door demanding in or not is irrelevant ... it's the opening up the door that's the problem. An arrangement between a number of conferences that limits participation to top 100 RPI teams as of a certain cut off date -- I can't imagine a problem with that. Is there any legal obligation to throw it open to everyone?

I'd be happy with a WCC challenge or an A-10 challenge.

The problem I think is the logistics.

1) How do you designate road and home teams? You'd have to do what BB did in setting them ahead of time. You can't expect teams to not know whether they're hosting or not unless you give at least a couple months notice. Can be mitigated with the use of a neutral court, but that's a lot of travel for a lot of teams on short notice.
2) When do you make the cutoff for the top 100 teams, or other top teams? You either have to do it late (and run into problem #1) or do it early and risk having teams tank.
3) Whither the teams that don't get matched up in this arrangement? Do they get the same game they did during the BB era, but now with no return agreement? And make no mistake, every team would get a game. There's no chance a bunch of teams would sacrifice a game in the schedule for the chance to get a matchup here.
4) TV rights. If you're not setting matchups ahead of time, then you can't set TV contracts unless someone agrees to broadcast it ahead of selection time. So if, say ESPN agrees to broadcast it, all of a sudden they're going to meddle in the selection process. We've seen how that works in the past. And if you don't want TV to meddle in that, you have no choice but to leave TV to the responsbility of the conferences/school, and that's much tougher.


In theory, your idea works. In practice, too many different agendas will ram into each other.

[GoShockers89]

I don't see the problem with a BB similar arrangement IF it's limited to the top teams. Whether teams knock on the door demanding in or not is irrelevant ... it's the opening up the door that's the problem. An arrangement between a number of conferences that limits participation to top 100 RPI teams as of a certain cut off date -- I can't imagine a problem with that. Is there any legal obligation to throw it open to everyone?

I'd be happy with a WCC challenge or an A-10 challenge.

The problem I think is the logistics.

1) How do you designate road and home teams? You'd have to do what BB did in setting them ahead of time. You can't expect teams to not know whether they're hosting or not unless you give at least a couple months notice. Can be mitigated with the use of a neutral court, but that's a lot of travel for a lot of teams on short notice.
2) When do you make the cutoff for the top 100 teams, or other top teams? You either have to do it late (and run into problem #1) or do it early and risk having teams tank.
3) Whither the teams that don't get matched up in this arrangement? Do they get the same game they did during the BB era, but now with no return agreement? And make no mistake, every team would get a game. There's no chance a bunch of teams would sacrifice a game in the schedule for the chance to get a matchup here.
4) TV rights. If you're not setting matchups ahead of time, then you can't set TV contracts unless someone agrees to broadcast it ahead of selection time. So if, say ESPN agrees to broadcast it, all of a sudden they're going to meddle in the selection process. We've seen how that works in the past. And if you don't want TV to meddle in that, you have no choice but to leave TV to the responsbility of the conferences/school, and that's much tougher.


In theory, your idea works. In practice, too many different agendas will ram into each other.

I agree with your post if the setup is attempted on a larger scale (say, 30-50+ teams). Clustereff waiting to happen with the exact same problems BB had.

I do think it could pulled off if limited to a very, very small pool (say 10-12 teams total) from "mid-major" leagues. This would inevitably cause butthurt on behalf of non-invitees, but really there's not much point in one of these things beyond helping at-large profiles (and 10-12 is about the max # of bubble teams from conferences ranked 9 or below come February). Of course there is still the difficulty of forecasting who is actually going to be good when you need to set what teams are in the pool ahead of time.

In terms of conference faceoffs, we're not gonna get a H2H with the A-10 or MWC. WCC could be a possibility.

[rlh04d]

I don't see the problem with a BB similar arrangement IF it's limited to the top teams. Whether teams knock on the door demanding in or not is irrelevant ... it's the opening up the door that's the problem. An arrangement between a number of conferences that limits participation to top 100 RPI teams as of a certain cut off date -- I can't imagine a problem with that. Is there any legal obligation to throw it open to everyone?

I'd be happy with a WCC challenge or an A-10 challenge.

The problem I think is the logistics.

1) How do you designate road and home teams? You'd have to do what BB did in setting them ahead of time. You can't expect teams to not know whether they're hosting or not unless you give at least a couple months notice. Can be mitigated with the use of a neutral court, but that's a lot of travel for a lot of teams on short notice.
2) When do you make the cutoff for the top 100 teams, or other top teams? You either have to do it late (and run into problem #1) or do it early and risk having teams tank.
3) Whither the teams that don't get matched up in this arrangement? Do they get the same game they did during the BB era, but now with no return agreement? And make no mistake, every team would get a game. There's no chance a bunch of teams would sacrifice a game in the schedule for the chance to get a matchup here.
4) TV rights. If you're not setting matchups ahead of time, then you can't set TV contracts unless someone agrees to broadcast it ahead of selection time. So if, say ESPN agrees to broadcast it, all of a sudden they're going to meddle in the selection process. We've seen how that works in the past. And if you don't want TV to meddle in that, you have no choice but to leave TV to the responsbility of the conferences/school, and that's much tougher.


In theory, your idea works. In practice, too many different agendas will ram into each other.

Good points. I hadn't thought about those logistical issues.

How about this: scheduling agreement between MVC, WCC, A-10, MWC, Horizon, WAC.
Following the end of a season, you select the two highest RPI teams from each of those conferences from that season and put them into a pool for the new Bracket Buster the next season.
Teams from each conference are split into home/road team pools: you know which of those teams will be playing home games and which will be playing road games, the only thing left in the air will be where the road teams will be traveling to.
February 1st you announce pairings based on RPI rankings for that season, giving three weeks of buildup to the games (which wouldn't even need to really be that long for any reason other than TV purposes, since who will be hosting games is already known).

I'm not sure how specifically you'd decide who is the home game and who is the road. You could simply make it so that the team with the highest RPI from a conference gets the home slot ... or do that but also say that one team can't host two years in a row ... or every two seasons you can change which conferences have the highest RPI team on the road and which conferences have the highest RPI team hosting.

The return game a season or two later works with this. The only problem I see with simply having the highest RPI team from a conference always host is that you'd make it so that a team like Gonzaga, which almost always has the highest RPI in their conference, might never be able to play a team that does similar in another conference (WSU in my mind, although obviously some folks here would argue that ).

For an example, just using the simplest home/away factor (highest RPI), the teams involved last season would have been:
MWC: UNLV (23), New Mexico (2)
WCC: Gonzaga (6), Saint Mary's (29)
A-10: Temple (41), Saint Louis (16)
MVC: Wichita State (37), Creighton (24)
WAC: New Mexico State (56), Nevada (173)
Horizon: Cleveland State (199), Valparaiso (58)

(Team selection based on 2011-12 RPIs, with their 2012-13 RPIs listed for seeding purposes.)

Which would have made last year's BracketBusters (matching up best home RPI to best road RPI, unless they're from the same conference):

Gonzaga (6) vs New Mexico (2)
UNLV (23) vs Saint Louis (16)
Wichita State (37) vs Saint Mary's (29)
Temple (41) vs Creighton (24)
New Mexico State (56) vs Valparaiso (58)
Cleveland State (199) vs Nevada (173)

Obviously you'll get some clunkers (Cleveland State vs Nevada), but five of those six games would have been great last season.

And then we'd have this group for this coming season:

MWC: New Mexico (2), Colorado State (18)
WCC: Gonzaga (6), Saint Mary's (29)
A-10: Saint Louis (16), VCU (25)
MVC: Wichita State (37), Indiana State (72)
WAC: Louisiana Tech (53), New Mexico State (56)
Horizon: Valparaiso (58), Detroit (64)

Any reason that couldn't work? Almost every team involved in this that would be looking at making the NCAA tournament would get games that could help them if they win but not hurt them if they lose. There's always the possibility you could be the last good team to get matched up with a bad team (say, if Valpo was a 170 RPI, New Mexico State would have been screwed), but ... don't be the lowest RPI

More teams and more conferences involved would continue to skew things so that the last few games would be less likely to match up a tournament-caliber team with a poor RPI team. And that's just a quick idea off the top of my head ... any idea that is based on the RPI of the previous season could populate home/road pools that could then be arranged in February. You could say every top 50/75/100 RPI team from the previous season is included, regardless of conference. The 12 teams with the highest RPI, regardless of conference ... the 20 teams, whatever.

The key points would be that you would need to choose the teams participating next season right at the end of the previous season (so every team that's involved knows they already have that game scheduled, and those not participating can schedule a game), limit it to a certain number of strong teams (based on the idea that most strong teams are strong year-to-year and won't immediately fall of the radar), designate which teams will be hosting games, and then match up teams based on the closest RPI matchups as close to the game as you can get.

TV issues would still be a concern, but I think ESPN would be aware of the fact that their meddling killed this once already, and a system that provides them with 5+ solid games a year should be allowed entirely up to RPI factors. Or I guess you could let it be based on BPI to make them happy.

[TheAsianSensation]

I agree with your post if the setup is attempted on a larger scale (say, 30-50+ teams). Clustereff waiting to happen with the exact same problems BB had.

I do think it could pulled off if limited to a very, very small pool (say 10-12 teams total) from "mid-major" leagues. This would inevitably cause butthurt on behalf of non-invitees, but really there's not much point in one of these things beyond helping at-large profiles (and 10-12 is about the max # of bubble teams from conferences ranked 9 or below come February). Of course there is still the difficulty of forecasting who is actually going to be good when you need to set what teams are in the pool ahead of time.

In terms of conference faceoffs, we're not gonna get a H2H with the A-10 or MWC. WCC could be a possibility.

It's possible to pull it off, but as you said, there's difficulty in forecasting. I'm actually willing to estimate that if you were to pick 12 midmajor teams right now to contend next year for at large bids, maybe about 7 or 8 will actually have a chance. I may have to look up some archived preseason brackets of mine to see if that's true though.

[TheAsianSensation]

Good points. I hadn't thought about those logistical issues.

[saving some space]

This is probably the one way you could get it to work. You'd need the teams to be willing to be flexible, and I don't think you can have much more than 12 or 16 teams. Because it'll just keep expanding. It happens in every sport. Overinclusion.

But as I mentioned above, there is a risk in forecasting, as teams can fall back. Plus, rising teams can't move up. The one team that gets hot won't have a chance.

And one bone to pick: you say the teams chosen should generally be the ones strong year in and year out. But Gonzaga, St Mary's, Wichita, the MWC teams, don't have as much trouble getting big games elsewhere. Well, actually they do, but relative to other mid majors they don't. Having a setup that makes it very difficult for new teams to break in is dicey. Look at all those poor schools in the WCC who aren't going to get by two of Gonzaga, St Mary's and BYU every year. Even if San Diego posts a top 50 RPI they might be behind one or two of them still, and TV would still beg for those three over San Diego. Just using an example. Another example: Indiana State. If ISU gets a top 50 RPI but UNI a top 75, and UNI has a bit more of a track record, would ESPN push for UNI over ISU?

What might be better is just to put an open date in the schedule in February for teams like Wichita to schedule non-con games. Let the individual schools do it. Encourage them to find another mid major to play. It's less messy that way. Of course it would be optional though, so you'd have a lot of agendas in play.

By the way, ESPN, they saw BB die once already. They don't care. They have new inventory from expanded power conferences. They'll either get another BB-like structure on their terms or not at all. Because they can. Of course, FOX could use some inventory....