How to reconcile the good things about the newly-established regular season conference schedule framework with the new tournament format proposed above....
For reference purposes, here's a copy and paste of the explanation of what we have right now:
Quote:"Each team will play everyone once and their travel partner twice in the first 14 games of the conference season before a reset that ranks the teams based on the standings. C-USA's best five (1 through 5), middle five (6-10) and bottom four (11-14) will be grouped together for four games in the final three weeks of the regular season for an 18-game schedule.
"We don't get enough Top 50, Top 100 games and so now we're going to make sure our Top 50 and Top 100 conference members play each other twice instead of once," MacLeod said.
"For conference tournament seeding purposes, teams will be locked in within their group. For example a team in the middle (6-10 group) will be seeded no higher than six and no lower than 10.
"She mentioned some other reasons for the new wrinkle such as having good television games late in the season and excitement for fans. Also, only 12 teams get in the C-USA tournament and the bottom four are playing for those spots."
The easy answer is, just eliminate the 1st seeds' bye in the first round, and go with 6-team division tourneys instead of 7-team ones.
But I'd much prefer not to.
(I keep saying this... to the degree that you exclude schools' fans from the one time of the year that they all have reason to gather in one place, you do your conference a disservice.)
In fact, I'd rather come up with something that corrects a minor but potentially significant flaw in the current structure--the fact that some teams may benefit from having a significantly weaker "travel partner" game than others get to have.
Do this instead.
1st phase
- Round-robin conference-wide... so, 13 games, structured so that inTRA-division you play 3H/3A, and inTER-division, you play 4H/3A one year, and 3H/4A the next... say, West Division schools get the extra home game in odd years, East in even.
2nd phase
- The 4 teams ranked #1 and #2 teams in the two divisions (as ranked by conference W/L) play each other home and away, so each one gets 6 games total. And, as with the current framework, the four teams involved are locked-in.
- Same, for the 4 ranked #3 and #4.
- The 6 teams ranked #5, #6 and #7 play this format: inTRAdivision 2H/2A, and then inTERdivision, then #5s get the #7s home and away, and the #6s get to play each other home and away.
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So, 19 games total:
First, a 13-game schedule that effectively defines which teams from each division are (a) locked into either the #1 or #2 slot in their divisional tournament, (b) locked into either the #3 or #4 slot, or (c ) locked into one of the bottom 3 slots
Then, second, a 6-game bonus schedule that serve the same purposes as in our current format's bonus schedule, most importantly, potentially holding school tournament seeding consequences for every school up and down the division standings.