http://www.ubbullrun.com/2011/4/26/21310...-divisions


ast post about MAC Divisions or Expansion unless there is some substantial news, I promise..... Maybe...

I'm a big fan of anything that helps MAC football get further ahead. I don't yet know if UMass is going to move us forward or not but there is one thing that the Minutemen will do for sure. They will shake up the MAC divisions.

The current MAC East / West alignment is going to change. Bowling Green or Miami are going to hop on over to the west to balance out the conferences football pool.

It's a good deal for either school, but better for Bowling green who's average commute to a football game would shrink to 130 miles and they would be paired with Toledo, their main rival.

But this won't work for hoops where the MAC is already a balanced league with six in the east and six in the west. So either Bowling Green/Miami is going to be a divisional ping pong ball or the Mid American Conference needs to do something drastic.

Poll on Bull-Run

No need for divisions or symmetrical schedules when you have an honest to goodness playoff after the regular season. This will in no way be the most 'fair' system for each and every team in each and every year but it may lift the conference as a whole.

Use some sensible, not perfect, method to pick the top 8 and the bottom 8 teams going into MAC play. After each team finishes their swing through the conference proceed to this 'pod play'. This would complete the home and home aspect and still maintain a 16 game conference schedule.

So last season you would have had, in the top half you would have had the MAC East maybe minus Bowling Green and Buffalo paired with Ball State and CMU. The Bottom seeding would have been Buffalo, Bowling Green, and the left overs from the West.

This lets the best of the top half teams pad their RPI's a bit. The biggest benefit would be to the top teams that are now in the MAC west. Being able to avoid four to six games a year against sub 300 RPI teams will help them to improve their profile for post season tournaments.

So how should the MAC do basketball?

No divisions period. They are not needed for a 12 team league.

I'm one of the few that likes the divisions, but that's not why I'm posting this.

+1 for the photoshop.

(04-26-2011 12:55 PM)utpotts Wrote:  No divisions period. They are not needed for a 12 team league.

How do you work the schedule without divisions? Unless you are going to a 22 game league schedule it becomes a clustereff.

(04-26-2011 01:34 PM)OUVan Wrote:  

(04-26-2011 12:55 PM)utpotts Wrote:  No divisions period. They are not needed for a 12 team league.

How do you work the schedule without divisions? Unless you are going to a 22 game league schedule it becomes a clustereff.

Not necessarily. You play each team once for 11 games. You play your primary rival twice to get to 12. Then you can rotate some home-and-homes with the rest of the schools to get to whatever number of conference games sounds good.

(04-26-2011 01:34 PM)OUVan Wrote:  

(04-26-2011 12:55 PM)utpotts Wrote:  No divisions period. They are not needed for a 12 team league.

How do you work the schedule without divisions? Unless you are going to a 22 game league schedule it becomes a clustereff.

Read the article

Same way the A10 does it... Everyone playes everyone else once and then you either divide the conference based on strength, or rivals, or past attendance figures and play half the conference one more time (a total of 16 games)...