(09-09-2021 09:52 AM)BePcr07 Wrote: I made a suggestion in an earlier post that a 9-school WCC could create a challenge with the Big West (11 schools) allowing the odd schools out to play each other during in-conference scheduling. I think it would work quite well.
There isn't a need for a WCC vs Big West challenge. I get what you mean, that with 16 conference games from Jan-March while everyone else is playing 18, IN THEORY, they would have an open week and 2 games to fill.
But that's not actually the the case for the WCC. The WCC Tournament starts on Thursday, 11 days before Selection Sunday. (They could start it on Friday now without BYU, since they don't have to skip Sunday anymore). The league also has a slot in the Hawai'i tournament over Christmas.
So they have one less week than any conference that starts their tourney during Championship Week. WCC regular season ended Feb. 27 last year, A10/MWC/Big East ended March 7.
Because of that, they were trying to cram in their 18 games in the amount of time you should really be playing 16 if Christmas falls on GOOD days of the week for basketball scheduling...
And if Christmas fell on the wrong day, it was taking away a weekend in December that Gonzaga could be playing OOC. So that meant (a) passing up opportunities for THAT WEEK, and (b) they had to play more OOC games closer together, and with them playing a national schedule as a marquee program, they had to pass up OTHER opportunities because they can't play at Arizona on Thursday and at Madison Square Garden on Saturday and expect to have legs.
It sounds like dropping from 16 to 18 was so Gonzaga could play more games against better competition and not hurt their RPI playing bad WCC teams. But really it was so they could play more games against better competition because of the CALENDAR more so than the WCC RPIs. And the change helped EVERYONE in the league, not just Gonzaga. The 5th place team went from 20-14 to 22-12 the first year they did it.