(04-11-2013 10:26 PM)WKUApollo Wrote: OK, bear with me and excuse the lack of knowledge if this is way out there but......I think we all can agree that the payout is less per team if we add more teams. That's a given but...
1. With 14 teams in an 8 conference game schedule, in any given year, half the teams will win 4 or more in conference. If teams average 1 or 2 OOC games, then realistically you'll have 7 teams become Bowl eligible each year. Help me but am I correct that CUSA has 5 Bowl tie-ins and 2 secondary tie-ins? If so, 14 teams will almost always fill those 7 slots, thus preventing a SBC team from filling one of the open slots. In a 16 team league, typically, 8 teams will become Bowl eligible each year. Is there a possibility for an 8th Bowl Tie-in? If not, there's a good chance a CUSA team would be left out of a Bowl on a regular basis. This brings up the question of how much, if any, does a conference make on Bowl games?
2. Given the scenarios above, does the increased number of teams increase the possible number of NCAA tourney bids? If so, does that increase bring in additional money to supplement the "gap" in football allocation?
I'm just trying to look at the total picture here and not just the football allocation per team for Gof5 and the TV contract distribution per team.
Currently, the SBC only has 2 Bowl tie-ins and I think there are some secondary or tertiary tie-ins. Would CUSA Bowl eligible teams be more apt to fill a slot over an SBC team with similar record? I bring this up because in the last 2 years, MT and WKU were left out of Bowls for similar reasons. I'm doubtful that would occur in CUSA. Bowl games raise the prestige of a conference and we have to consider the fact we need to continue filling as many slots as possible to remain ahead of the SBC and MAC.
There are two different answers to your questions because you are asking about two different sports:
1. In football, in terms of bowl tie-ins, more teams does not hurt. Even if you add teams that are atrociously bad, it still helps the team earn more bowl revenue over the long term. The reason why is simple: With the exception of a few years in the SEC in the late 60s, every conference always finishes .500 among games played between its members. Therefore, adding two more teams provides the conference with eight more wins total (and eight more losses) if you are playing an eight game conference schedule. If those teams are atrociously bad, they still provide the rest of the conference with eight more wins. If those two teams are really really good, then the rest of the conference has eight more losses and they get the eight wins. Either way, the conference bowl tie-ins have more options to choose from.
Banowsky has done a great job of setting CUSA up with a solid, stable bowl lineup year in and year out. We actually own the Heart of Dallas Bowl outright with its B1G tie-in. We will have 5-6 bowl tie-ins in future years. That said, the conference could be looking at expansion as a way to strengthen and improve our bowl lineup.
Where adding more teams hurts us is when the potential quality of our wins is factored in. In practice, this will mean the most as it applies to our chances of making it to the access bowl. I made this point above when I pointed out that ASU and ULL are 0-8 versus power conference teams in the last two years. The power conferences will weigh victories against power conferences in a manner that is disproportionate to the weight they deserve. The same is true of the polls and the computers. In other words, beating an 8-9 win Go5 team in OOC will earn an 11-win Go5 team the sobriquet of, "yeah, but who did you play". Beating a three-win power conference team will earn the sobriquet of, "you beat State U...but they weren't any good this year". In other words, the win against the sorry power conference team counts for more because the major media and the controlling powers in college football recognize them.
It stinks, but it is just the way it is. This is unlikely to change no matter how much math is used in the new formulation to determine the teams who play in the access bowls, although for different reasons than the perceptions outlined above. The three win power conference team will likely have played several highly thought of teams along the way, while the Go5 teams won't get that opportunity. It is still a perception issue, but it becomes less one of name recognition and more one of this: "State U. sucked this year because they couldn't beat the good teams on their schedule. That Go5 team won eight games this year because everybody on their schedule sucked."
2. Basketball could go both ways. The way it is set up right now depends heavily on how individual teams play, and how conferences collectively schedule their non-conference games. Thus, if a conference plays a lot of name opponents out of conference spread over a lot of teams in the conference, then that conference will have a strong RPI number for the best teams to work with when you get into conference play. This is where individual play of the component teams of a conference comes into play. If most of the teams in your conference aren't very good, then they are going to lose a lot of bad non-conference games and it won't matter if you scheduled really strong teams. Basically, in order for a conference to be a strong basketball conference, you have to collectively beat the other basketball conferences more often than you lose to them. The more games you win against the other conferences, the better your conference looks. The best teams in your conference, the ones that are worthy of postseason play, will then separate themselves during conference play from the other teams. As a few points of fact, consider that CUSA's best win this past year was probably UTEP's win over Oregon. While ECU's loss to Tulsa knocked them out of the RPI Top 100 and cost Southern Miss two Top 100 wins, potentially putting Middle Tennessee or La Salle in the tournament ahead of Southern Miss. This wasn't ECU's fault: Had CUSA been better as a conference or Southern Miss been better as a team, that loss would not have mattered.
Thus, two more teams can help a conference in basketball provided they can expand the breadth of solid non-conference opponents the conference plays against...but only if they don't also lose to a bunch of bad teams at the same time.
Improving as a conference means you get more teams in the Tournament and thus earn more tournament credits. Improving as a team means you go deeper in the tournament and thus earn more tournament credits. Fail to do both or either, and you become worse both as a team and a conference and nobody makes much money off the tournament.
One final point: Both bowl revenues and tournament credits are split into shares, with participant teams getting extra shares. This setup usually means somewhat less money for participant teams as they have to compensate for travel costs (bowl games can cost more money than they bring in), but they also get more practice time.
I just think the travel thing gets used too much in certain conversations.
