(07-02-2022 10:19 AM)WKUApollo Wrote: (07-02-2022 10:08 AM)sstaedtler88 Wrote: I was looking at the Director's Cup and the overall health of some FCS programs wanting to become FBS, possibly in CUSA.
#80. NC A&T
#93. Stephen F. Austin
#104. Delaware
#122. ETSU
#124. Kennesaw State
#161. Richmond
#193. Chattanooga
#196. Mercer
#229. McNeese State
#229. Jackson State
#251. Eastern Kentucky
#264. Lamar
Kennesaw State and Stephen F. Austin seem like the best options. Tarleton State was not listed because of being division 2, I believe. They are obviously an option. I didn't expect EKU to be so far down. Wish ETSU had FBS aspirations.
Although a nice ranking system, the Directors Cup is a skewed system for weighing success at the conference level. It only measures how well a school does in NCAA Championships. For example, a school could have a single golf player and a tennis player win NCAA games and get lots of points and that school not win any conference championships but...another school could win the mens and womens basketball, football, and baseball conference championship but lose post season. The school with golf and tennis player would be ranked high in the Directors Cup but the school with all the conference championships wouldn't.
Tarleton State isn't listed because they didn't win any WAC championships. Only a couple of sports provide an avenue for gaining Directors Cup points for non-champions, and for non-P5s, these opportunities are even more scarce.
WKUApollo is totally correct that the Directors Cup is flawed.
Under the current system, a team winning 20+ basketball games in a single bid conference gets 0 points if they don't win the conference tournament. (This happened to Liberty this past year, and would've happened to Jacksonville State if Bellarmine had been eligible for the Dance.)
Meanwhile, mediocre teams from multi-bid conferences continue to rack up points in the postseason. It's horrifically skewed toward the P5s, and other than recognizing teams winning the most championships and/or postseason games within each conference, it serves no other useful purpose. It's certainly no way to gauge relative strength of athletic programs between conferences.
A better system would simply rank regular season conference finishes for all sports a school sponsors. If your baseball team finishes 1st in a 10-team conference, you get 10 points, 9 points for 2nd, 8 points for 3rd, and so on. Then, add bonus points for conference tournament and NCAA tournament wins.
Multi-bid conferences would still have an advantage, but at least solid teams from lower-tier conferences wouldn't go from conference tournament favorite to ZERO just because of one bad game.
The regular season would matter, conference tournament success would still be rewarded, and teams performing well in postseason NCAA tournaments would still receive a nice boost.
It's a nice dream.