(06-25-2022 12:12 PM)Arch Stanton Wrote: 9 creates round robin in football and double round robin in BB. 4 OOC creates some interesting regular season matchups
I like less conference games and more non conference games.
A huge problem with assessing how good teams really are is the effect conference play has on any SOS metric.
Every conference is going .500 against itself. If all games were conference games, teams with teams with the exact same records would be essentially tied in a ranking system based on SOS. But when your conference wins more OOC games (Regardless of whom they are against), now everyone in the conference gets a higher SOS from conference games.
So playing 18-22 basketball games in conference, the number one thing for your national rating (aka getting into the NCAA Tourney or CFP) is how the BOTTOM of your conference does OOC.
When your 13th place team goes 9-3 OOC by buying 7 home games against teams 300+, your bubble teams are playing a 14-16 team that doesn't look bad at all on their SOS.
Playing NO ONE OOC actually helps your SOS, if your entire conference (or bottom half) does it! Which is the opposite of how SOS is supposed to work!
If there was one rule on conference size that was "Must play a single-round robin in all sports" then you couldn't have more than 12 members (because football is a 12-game season), and the basketball schedule would be 18 OOC games and 12 conference games, so your SOS would be WHO YOU PLAY OOC instead of just a counterintuitive mathematical technicality.
Ultimately, if the NCAA wasn't a clueless organization that lacked vision, they could have established TV revenue sharing in 1984 (Like, buy your rights from the NCAA for 50% of what you sell them for).
And then conferences wouldn't be TV cartels, but instead groups of teams that SHOULD be playing each other every year.
Because of TV cartels, we're get Rutgers/Nebraska, Pitt/Clemson, Minnesota/Maryland, Louisville/Wake, West Virginia/Oklahoma St, Florida/Missouri, UCF/BYU as conference "Rivalries" that no one really ever craved.
But we don't get Nebraska/Colorado, Pitt/WVU, Maryland/Virginia, Louisville/Cincinnati, Syracuse/Georgetown, and tons of other historical rivals that really should happen.
The ideal size for any conference is a group of teams who ALL SHOULD BE PLAYING EACH OTHER every year.