(03-01-2021 10:12 AM)Monarchblue Wrote: ODU's basketball excellence, outside of two NIT Final Fours and a D2 title in the 70s, is more about being consistently good than big seasons (which you acknowledge later). La Salle had their S16, and good for them, but it was an outlier.
I'm not saying remove La Salle;
But if La Salle and ODU were up for the last spot in the A-10, I think far more people take ODU.
Saint Louis is very up-and-down, which is fun to watch play out on the realignment board; when the Billikens are doing well, then SLU was a lock to be the 11th Big East member, and when they weren't, then not only was Dayton the lock 11th, SLU wasn't consistently good enough to warrant consideration and in fact should perhaps consider swallowing their pride and joining the MVC. Until they got good again and *boom* Big East lock.
That's definitely true in the A-10 because that 14th program is usually Fordham, a mid-pack Patriot program in A-10's clothing. But the difference between first and 14th in CUSA isn't insurmountable. This year's 14th place team is FIU, which has a good coach and could make some moves in the years to come (they could also not make those moves, but this is about capability, not guaranteed outcomes). Last year's 14th was Middle Tennessee, which two years prior won their second straight NCAA first-round game. In 2019 the 14th was UTEP, and they definitely have the resources to win the conference at some point in the next eight years.
The biggest difference between the A-10 and CUSA is that the resources/commitment gap is larger in the A-10. For as much as we complain about FIU/FAU/UTSA not investing enough in basketball, the gap is nowhere near as large as the top programs in the A-10 versus Fordham and La Salle (and until recently you could include Duquesne, I think). And in football, I think everyone's trying, they're just not producing as a whole.
I agree with virtually all of this.
- I referenced La Salle's Sweet 16 run as an indicator of people want to throw out a team that has a Sweet 16 run; The powers that be care about MBB NCAA Success, which is why the last people we've added have had deep runs to Final Fours and Elite 8s. People undervalue consistency.
- We'd definitely take ODU over LAS/FORD.
- No one is kicking schools out. All you can do is Grow in size and then split in half and form a new league if you want to leave someone behind!
- The A-10 gap between top and bottom IS pretty vast, but the depth of everyone else has overcome that. Having a bad team or two in your league is actually GOOD, because conference play is zero sum.
- The A-10's biggest problem isn't actually LAS/FORD, it's that Saint Louis, Saint Joseph's, Rhode Island, UMass and George Washington go from "24-8 NCAA teams" to 12-19 teams yo-yo style. Every team should schedule to be no worse than 9-3 in non-conference. You don't need marquee wins if you're 10th in the standings.
- With the amount of programs in Division I, under .500 is a bad year for the level the A-10 and half C-USA is trying to compete at. Let's look at C-USA:
La Tech 0 bad seasons in 12 years, 5 in 23 years
WKU has 1 bad season in 21 years.
ODU has 2 "bad" seasons in 18 years.
MTSU has 3 in 11 years (the last three after winning 19+ 8 years in a row
Marshall 3 in 13 years
UAB 3 in 19 years
Charlotte 11 in the last 35 years, but 10 since they left C-USA 1.0.
UTEP: 7 in 20 years, only 3 in the last 18 years (El Paso is really far away).
North Texas: 8 in 20 years
UTSA: 10 in 20 years
Southern Miss: 12 in 20 years
FAU: 13 in 20 years
FIU: 19 in 21 years
Rice: 12 in 16 years
In any given season, you've got 6 quality teams having good seasons; and 8 teams struggling. And that's killing you.
The average SOS of CONFERENCE games is your OOC Win Pct + the 139-139 you'll always do against each other (regular season/conf tourney). So you go 67-83 OOC in 2020, each game is worth .4813 on your SOS, 19 times each, dragging down all your RPIs.
So you have NCAA calibre teams, with NIT resumes, and NIT teams with CBI resumes because of nothing more than "how the math works."
Those 7 teams I said should leave, plus Liberty and Buffalo; your SOS from conference games is worth far more, and people don't view you as a one-bid league, they view you like a deeper MVC.
- It WOULD be a massive risk to take if the teams good in basketball were bad in football, and the teams bad in basketball were good in football (like Kansas and Kentucky football; Penn State and Nebraska basketball). But for the most part, the teams I suggest you take with you to split C-USA in half are 7 of the best 9 teams in BOTH basketball AND FOOTBALL.
The only reason the 14 of you are together is timing of who was in the league and was C-USA better than where you were or where you elevating to FBS. There's no real reason for the 5 eastern members to tie their lot to FIU/FAU, the four Texas schools or Southern Miss. It was just that Rice, So Miss, UTEP, were in the group that invited you.