MBB schedule released
- Thread starter RayShimley
- Start date
I like the look of this, overall.
Plenty of cake early, some decent non-league tests, get a big challenge immediately by opening Big 12 @KU. Home games vs. UT & WVa immediately follow, too, so we'll know a little bit about ISU's league potential right away.
Second half of B12 looks slightly more steep than first half, but offers plenty of chances to improve resume late in the season.
Plenty of cake early, some decent non-league tests, get a big challenge immediately by opening Big 12 @KU. Home games vs. UT & WVa immediately follow, too, so we'll know a little bit about ISU's league potential right away.
Second half of B12 looks slightly more steep than first half, but offers plenty of chances to improve resume late in the season.
Looks better than last year. A couple of opportunities in the Non Conference to pick up some good wins. I would still like to see our strength of schedule go up in the coming years.
I like that there are 5 conference Saturday home games vs. 4 conference weekday home games. That should marginally help attendance and the AD's bottom line.
I'm not sure this is any better than last season's nothingburger of a non-conference schedule. As some will recall, our best non-conference win a year ago was a home win against the second place team in the Patriot league. I don't think the selection committee ignored that, considering that we equaled Baylor's conference resume and ended up 23 lines below them on the S-curve.
Doubtful a more difficult non-con would have improved the seed, as it was the losses to Drake and UNI that were hard to ignore. Losing 2 out of 3 to Texas was the final blow.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
The Vegas tourney makes it a big step up. Cincy and either Oregon/UNLV beats Providence and Rice.
Not sure about that, because neither neutral Cincy or neutral Oregon beats @Michigan from last year, and you're also forgetting that we don't play the @UNI game, which would have been a nice boost. If we do play UNLV (basically an away game), that'll be great for SOS, but we'll have to beat Cincy first, and we'll be a 4-6 point underdog.
Regardless, an equally big issue is not the marquee (if you can call them that) non-conference games, but the games against the complete nobodies that drag down the SOS from the back end. Because playing, for example, St. Mary's and Harvard would give you a better SOS than playing Kentucky and Towson. And there's a lot of Towson here.
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Pretty weak home non conference schedule. Not much to get excited about other than the BYU game.
CycloneErik
Well-Known Member
@ Michigan is replaced by BYU at home. Iowa is improved and on the road.
Cincy/ either opponent on neutral court beat Providence/Rice on neutral court.
Replacing a 4 seed on the road with a bubble team at home is even?
There's no point quibbling about this, though, because my bigger issue is addressed in the second paragraph of my last post, specifically the several games against the absolute worst of the cupcakes, which drag down the SOS from the back and negate the high-level games on the schedule.
You don't think this had anything to do with it?
Baylor
25-6 reg season
(13-0 non con)
2-1 conf tourney
ISU
22-9 reg season
(10-3 non con)
0-1 conf tourney
They had 5 more wins and 3 fewer losses. It is short sighted to blame the difference in seeding entirely on the non-conf SOS.
Everyone has those games though. And it's tough to determine how good/bad a non conference schedule is when it first comes out. For all we know, BYU could turn into a top 25 team and a very good win for us and Cincinnati could be worse than expected and be a bad loss if we do lose to them.
I didn't. As I mentioned, our best non-conference win was at home against the second-place team from the Patriot League, before half of the country even knew it was basketball season. We didn't even give ourselves a chance to help our resume in the non-conference. If we're going to play the strawman game, then it's just as shortsighted to think that our non-conference schedule didn't hurt our tournament seeding.
By this logic, we should just schedule Iowa Central, DMACC, Cedar Rapids South Junior High, and Ames Middle School. Because who knows how good they're going to be?
The point is, instead of playing Southern, Alabama A&M, Campbell, North Carolina A&T, Florida Gulf Coast, Nebraska-Omaha, and UMKC, we could play Lehigh, Mercer, Tulsa, Princeton, Wymoing, Missouri State, and Utah State. Perhaps to casual fans there isn't much of a difference between the two lists, but it makes a big difference to those who look at the numbers that matter in mid-March.
Perhaps that costs an extra $250,000 as a whole to bring in better cupcakes, but that's an important investment for a basketball program, both in terms of better competition and more growth throughout the early season and final seeding in the tournament.
Did you notice how I only listed the bigger schools on the schedule? Obviously we know some of those smaller schools will be a RPI killer
Yes, we probably could do without all those cupcakes but there are also some games on the schedule that would give our RPI a big boost.
