Alcorn's and Akron's records should improve a ton by the end of the year, which will pad the RPI even more.
Quote:It is the budget that is hurting the schedule the most. The cost of bringing in a low major that is likely to win their conference and the one that will finish at the bottom is tens of thousands of dollars.
My thing is that if you pay the extra money to bring in teams that are more intriguing as opponents, you should also end up selling more tickets and making your money back. There were several games where the overall attendance was below $5k. In some cases the other team probably walked away with more money than UC did.
There are other ways to help the budget out....like playing on TV. I don't know how revenue sharing works in the Big East exactly, but for a non conference game that's on TV, UC probably gets to keep the majority (if not all) of the revenue.
Even still, it's one thing to not get the best teams from the lower level conferences. It's another to end up with the absolute worst. I don't think anyone had any realistic expectations of Pine Bluff or Chicago State winning anywhere close to ten games. Same with Radford. If you replace them with teams like IPFW, or Western Illinois, or Sacred Heart, or teams like that. They won't win their league, but they'll win over 30% of their games. That would make a very noticeable difference. And those are teams that UC would beat 98% of the time.
When you schedule that weak, you do nothing to help yourself on paper. It's also my belief that when you schedule a team that your bench could blow out, you do nothing to help yourself off paper either. I don't mean that as an attack. I'm extremely impressed with UC's team right now. It's just that I think they made it harder on themselves. Playing a weak schedule puts MORE pressure on you to play well in conference becuase you essentially take a pass on making any sort of case for yourself out of conference.