I don't know the answer yet. I'm going to run two scenarios, and see what the numbers say for total travel over 2 years of conference basketball games, assuming Thursday-Saturday game road trips to paired travel partners.

One model is single-round robin, plus one game against your travel partner to get to the NCAA minimum of 14. The other model is divisional play, home-and-home in your division for 12 games, plus 2 cross-division games that I guess would be on a 7 year rotation.

Partner pairs: UTEP-UTSA, UNT-Rice, LT-USM, FIU-FAU, UAB-MT, WKU-Marshall, ODU-Charlotte.

It would certainly significantly contain travel costs.

Conferences are pretty much allowed to schedule any way they want. Since there really aren't any teams in CUSA that stand out from the others - that is a team that everybody is clamoring to have on their schedule - reducing travel should be a pretty easy task. With a few exceptions, these are schools that don't have so much history together for that to be a problem.

CUSA's history only goes back 25 years. But even then, it is something like an axe that has had 4 new heads and five new handles in that time. You can say it's the same conference you started with, but it's almost completely new. Only 2 schools have been in the league since the beginning - Southern Miss and UAB. They do however, have a pretty impressive list of former members:

Cincinnati
DePaul
East Carolina
Houston
Louisville
Marquette
Memphis
St Louis
SMU
USF
TCU
Tulane
Tulsa
UCF

I doubt any current member has more than a few schools they really care about playing. Just let them play those home and home every year and use geography to fill out the rest of the league schedule.

(05-31-2020 04:39 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  I don't know the answer yet. I'm going to run two scenarios, and see what the numbers say for total travel over 2 years of conference basketball games, assuming Thursday-Saturday game road trips to paired travel partners.

One model is single-round robin, plus one game against your travel partner to get to the NCAA minimum of 14. The other model is divisional play, home-and-home in your division for 12 games, plus 2 cross-division games that I guess would be on a 7 year rotation.

Partner pairs: UTEP-UTSA, UNT-Rice, LT-USM, FIU-FAU, UAB-MT, WKU-Marshall, ODU-Charlotte.

One of the problems I've heard from our conference mates is that sometimes it's difficult to schedule OOC, and that's with an 18-game schedule. Drop down to 14 and it's dicier. I suppose there's nothing that keeps CUSA schools from playing each other OOC (didn't UNC and Wake Forest do that?).

If a recollect correctly, wasn’t there talk of going to 16 with the intention of splitting once the two sides were together along enough to satisfy NCAA autobid requirements the same way the Big East has intended to do in the 2005 rebuild?

Then there were some changes to the autobid rules because of the WAC’s disaster and then the new G5 CFP distributions were punitive to conferences larger than 10 members and the idea died.

IMHO, A planned split was a course they should have stuck with.

(05-31-2020 06:35 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  If a recollect correctly, wasn’t there talk of going to 16 with the intention of splitting once the two sides were together along enough to satisfy NCAA autobid requirements the same way the Big East has intended to do in the 2005 rebuild?

I don't think so. The WAC rule was in January 2011, the Big East doesn't get raided until September 2011. And then the MWC and CUSA farted around for a long time with "The Alliance".

Then again, "the alliance" indicates that they werent paying attention to the rulebook and the changes.

This is a no-brainer.

The answer is "yes."

The alliance was before Houston, Memphis, SMU, and UCF joined the Big East (AAC) to be followed by Tulane, ECU and Tulsa. Also San Diego State and Boise State were looking at joining the Big East following TCU. It was a very different Conference USA, looking more like the American in composition. Both conferences were trying to hang onto members. Only USM, UAB, Rice, UTEP and Marshall remain from that C-USA lineup. BYU was also considered in this and I think Fresno State of the WAC.

You hear supporters of these same schools in the American kind of wanting to revive it, in the sense of cherry picking maybe 5 Western schools. But that ship sailed, and it didn't pay attention to the NCAA rules (as johnbragg points out).

Divisional play, or shadow divisional play in sports like basketball and volleyball could help. C-USA already plays Division based in Football, Softball and women's soccer. Men's Soccer is only 8 teams already eastern tilted (no Texas, Louisiana or Mississippi teams, Kentucky and Florida as affiliates). Baseball makes more sense to local schedule (shadow division) than play Division as UTEP and UNT don't sponsor, so no East-West line works well.

So the actual answer is, they pretty much use Divisions everywhere it makes sense. Men's and Women's Basketball and Women's Volleyball could play Division, but since the season is mostly Tournament seeding these days, local scheduling ("shadow division" or shadow pods") makes the most sense. That being the case C-USA is doing what makes sense in the current structure.

(05-31-2020 06:32 PM)Cyniclone Wrote:  

(05-31-2020 04:39 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  I don't know the answer yet. I'm going to run two scenarios, and see what the numbers say for total travel over 2 years of conference basketball games, assuming Thursday-Saturday game road trips to paired travel partners.

One model is single-round robin, plus one game against your travel partner to get to the NCAA minimum of 14. The other model is divisional play, home-and-home in your division for 12 games, plus 2 cross-division games that I guess would be on a 7 year rotation.

Partner pairs: UTEP-UTSA, UNT-Rice, LT-USM, FIU-FAU, UAB-MT, WKU-Marshall, ODU-Charlotte.

One of the problems I've heard from our conference mates is that sometimes it's difficult to schedule OOC, and that's with an 18-game schedule. Drop down to 14 and it's dicier. I suppose there's nothing that keeps CUSA schools from playing each other OOC (didn't UNC and Wake Forest do that?).

That seems like it was the main point of the widely discussed topic of a scheduling agreement to get regional games (frequently confused with conference mergers) ... take advantage of NCAA lower limits on playing together to reduce in-conference traveling costs, then fall back on the scheduling agreement to get away OOC games that have lower cost travel by, in return, agreeing to host home OOC games from others schools in that conference to give your visitors lower cost travel.

14 conference games (sure, keep the divs separate) then shared pod play with the Sun Belt: 7 total teams in West, Central, and East pods and then a 5 team Super Pod for the best 2 to 3 teams from each conference. Cap it with Conference tournaments.