(09-11-2017 10:35 AM)monarx Wrote: [ -> ]Im glad to see CUSA teams recruiting good 3 & 4* players. We just need to be one of them. The top half of this conference has the potential to be quite good.
On another note, Maybe CUSA should split into two divisions for hoops. The "We care about basketball" division and the "We don't care about basketball" division. The top two winners of the two divisions meet up for a final four tournament with the winner getting the auto bid. If we did that, the #2 team in the "we care" division should have a pretty good shot at an at large bid every year. Maybe even the #3 team.
There's got to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff, because it's hard to tell people that winning CUSA isn't exactly easy when all they see is that 23rd ranking in the conference RPI.
My idea, which has evolved and unevolved over the years, is to do a single round-robin (13 games), then split into seven-team pods for the final six games — top half in one pod, bottom half in the other.
In the second part, you reverse the home/road alignment of the teams you played in the round-robin. Let's say the first pod is ODU, WKU, Middle Tennessee, UAB, Louisiana Tech, Marshall and Charlotte. If ODU played WKU, UAB and Marshall on the road in the round-robin, they'd host in pod play, while traveling to Middle, La. Tech and Charlotte.
First-pod members are guaranteed top-seven seeds in the conference tournament; the second pod fights for anywhere from one to five spots in the tournament (depending on whether you want eight, 10 or 12 teams).
It rewards the better teams more than it does now by giving them more games against better competition and less opportunity to get tangled in RPI messes in the bottom of the conference, thus improving their chances for an NCAA or NIT at-large bid.
The big issue, one I've yet to resolve, is unbalanced home/away schedules (if ODU happened to host all six of their pod-mates in round-robin play, then they wouldn't have any home games in the pod). You could schedule within the pod by giving everyone three home and three road games (they'd reserve the dates, then fill in the schedule accordingly), but then you run the risk of having School A visiting School B twice in the same season. The scheduling priority would be to give the road team in the first matchup the home game in the pod, but there's almost certainly going to be matchups where a 2-0 split is inevitable.
The other idea I've espoused is having the top five or six teams play a round-robin at a neutral site instead of having a regular tournament, thus giving the top teams four or five games against higher-quality competition. But then you run the risk of a) relatively meaningless last-day games and an anticlimactic conclusion, and b) having your title and NCAA auto bid decided by a tiebreaker, which always sucks.
At the very least, CUSA should consider an A-10 scheduling arrangement — figure out who the top teams are likely to be, and make sure they get home-and-homes with most of them. Though even the A-10's schedule is still regionally heavy — VCU gets Dayton twice but also Richmond, George Mason and GW. So from ODU's perspective, maybe they get one or two more good games, but perhaps not enough to effect significant change.
There's no simple answers. Simplistic, yes; simple, no.
