Conference USA just announced some innovative new scheduling, which will pit the best teams against each other to boost RPI in the final few weeks of the regular season.

https://deadspin.com/conference-usa-is-completely-revamping-its-conference-s-1826386373

Thoughts? Would it work for the Southland?

TallTexan said:

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Conference USA just announced some innovative new scheduling, which will pit the best teams against each other to boost RPI in the final few weeks of the regular season.

https://deadspin.com/conference-usa-is-completely-revamping-its-conference-s-1826386373

Thoughts? Would it work for the Southland?

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Excellent article! A question arises from this portion of the article..

"A team is given one (1) unit for appearing in an NCAA tournament game. For each round it advances, it is awarded another unit. A single unit for this past year's tournament clocked in at around $270,000. These units are not paid out to the programs individually. The NCAA instead groups together the units accrued by each conference; at the end of the tournament, it doles out money to conferences, not schools, according to that conference's combined number of units.

The conferences then either divvy up the payouts evenly amongst all schools, or pay them to the schools who made appearancesthe NCAA encourages conferences to make it even-steven, but not everybody is inclined to listen."

Question: What did the SLC do with the money that SFA made by playing in the first round? Did we have to share that rather paltry amount with every one of the other 12 SLC teams, or was there any monetary incentive to even make the dadgum NCAA tournament by allowing us to keep most of it??? Anyone know?

And BTW, personally I don't think this new method would help the SLC, since SFA's view at the top is mostly of a bunch of slow pack mules laboring at the bottom of the mountain.

edstile said:

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TallTexan said:

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Conference USA just announced some innovative new scheduling, which will pit the best teams against each other to boost RPI in the final few weeks of the regular season.

https://deadspin.com/conference-usa-is-completely-revamping-its-conference-s-1826386373

Thoughts? Would it work for the Southland?

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And BTW, personally I don't think this new method would help the SLC, since SFA's view at the top is mostly of a bunch of slow pack mules laboring at the bottom of the mountain.

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Agree on your thoughts on this relative to the SLC. Would either Nicholls or SLU wanted to add a game against SFA last season or prefer their chances to win conference without that? Improved RPI was meaningless to them.

I actually don't think this is a great fit for the SLC. Maybe in 10 years if the additional 2 out of conference games can build up another program or two to have contender status to SFA.

From our point of view, anything that makes us less likely to win games in March is a bad deal. If playing SLU/Nicholls two more times means we're more likely to beat Kentucky in the tourney, sure. If it doesn't then I say it's a no go.

To answer your question Ed, I'm not sure how the SLC splits money up.

I did see a suggestion that a football conference could do this, which I think would make sense for the Big 12 for "Championship weekend". Have 1 play 2, 3 play 4, etc. Would likely get a 5 win team over the hump to qualify for a bowl game, as well as adding 4 more conference games to a weekend usually devoid of football.

Thanks, forgot we had an NCAA specific thread.