Interesting to see how NCAA handles basketball versus football.
Play a strong non-conference in basketball but lose several of those games and you get rewarded for it. UNC will probably get the one seed and I guarantee the non con SOS will be the go-to talking point. But play a shotty conference, have fewer good wins in the last 90 days, have worse losses in that same time period, lose conference championship to a team that wasn’t going to make tourney otherwise and they’re like “but they scheduled strong teams 4 months ago”.
Let’s also keep in mind that these blue blood teams get invited to more Thanksgiving tournaments (we had no way of knowing what our field in Orlando was going to look like) and other showcases. They will schedule each other because there is little risk to their brand if, for example, Duke loses to Michigan State at some random showcase in Brooklyn. If TAM doesn’t underachieve, Iowa doesn’t suck, and we pull Marquette in the Big East challenge it’s a completely different narrative.
Juxtapose that will what happened in football this year. FSU got hosed due in part to the fact that people didn’t think that they could win the first round game with their starting QB out. They weren’t even talking resume. They were talking about how they looked recently and going so far as to speculate how they would do in the future.
College athletics is such a mess in so many ways but maybe that’s part of the charm.