Among the scheduling gimmicks that conferences have tried in recent years, the one that Conference USA will roll out in 2018-19 will stand out the most. The rationale behind it is understandable, but the reality is that fulfilling what the conference office hopes to will depend on things other than who teams play in conference.
Conference USA has fallen on hard times since the middle of the last decade, at a time when the conference was right there with the power conferences. It hasn’t been the same ever since the Big East raided it for the likes of Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and Marquette. Since 2005, the last season those programs were members, the conference has had multiple NCAA Tournament bids twice (2006 and 2010), and each time just two teams made it. The conference has had a first round win in each of the past four seasons, but the problem has been getting teams there that don’t win the conference tournament and seeding.
Enter the new scheduling formula, unveiled back in May and ready to go into effect this season.
The 14 programs will play each other once and their travel partner a second time during the first seven weeks of conference play. At that point, the teams will be divided into three tiers based on the standings: first through fifth place, sixth through tenth and 11th through 14th. During the final three weeks, teams will play within that group for their last four games of conference play, meaning the top five teams will play each other again.
Interestingly, at this point seeding for the conference tournament – which will only consist of the top 12 teams – will be determined to a degree. While teams will still move up and down in the standings, the top five seeds will be the top five teams at that time, which means that if one team collapses and finishes, say, ninth, that team will still be seeded in the top five. A team that surges late into the top five will still be seeded lower.
But all of that is secondary to an important reality. This new scheduling formula will mean nothing if the conference doesn’t reverse its fortunes in non-conference play, which is the biggest reason it has not had an at-large selection since 2010 and especially of late, as well as why its entrants have not had good seeds.
Last season, Conference USA teams had one win against an RPI top 25 team (Western Kentucky’s win over Purdue in the Battle 4 Atlantis) and just four more wins against teams ranked 26-50. The best non-conference RPI belonged to Marshall at 76, and Old Dominion was the only other team in the top 100 at 94. That helped translate into just one team in the top 60 – Middle Tennessee at 34 and with no wins over a lock NCAA Tournament team – and six of its 14 teams have RPIs of at least 250.
A further look at the non-conference performance tells the tale. While the NCAA used a different system last season to evaluate quality wins, the RPI was still a part of it, so the numbers give you a sense of things. In the regular season, Conference USA teams went 97-79 in non-conference in 2017-18, but 26 of those wins came against non-Division I teams. Take those wins away and the conference had a losing mark. They went 0-4 against the ACC, 0-6 against the Big 12, 1-7 against the Big Ten, 1-1 against the Pac-12 and 2-7 against the SEC.
That isn’t a recipe for placing multiple teams into the NCAA Tournament. It was, however, an improvement over 2016-17 and even a year before that.
How bad was 2016-17? Middle Tennessee was the only team in the entire conference with a two-digit RPI (35). Three teams were in the 300s, and only six teams had an RPI in the top 200 (one of them, UAB, was right there at 200). No Conference USA team scored a top 25 win, and Middle Tennessee scored two of the conference’s top 50 wins and two of their five wins against teams ranked from 51-100. And in 2015-16, only two teams had an RPI with two digits – neither finishing in the top 75 – and Conference USA teams didn’t score a single RPI top 50 win.
The name of the game for a conference like Conference USA is getting good wins and avoiding bad losses in non-conference play. When that happens, teams that pick up those wins are more likely to have an RPI that makes them a quality team to beat for NCAA Tournament purposes, and if most of the teams do that, it means there aren’t teams at the bottom against whom wins can at times hurt someone’s RPI.
A look at the opposite end of the scale shows how this works. Last season, the Big 12 had nine of its ten teams in play for the NCAA Tournament right up to the conference tournament. It was largely a result of its non-conference performance, first and foremost, where even last-place Iowa State had a top 50 win. It meant that quality win opportunities were abundant, and bad loss opportunities were minimized. No one expects Conference USA to be the Big 12 or SEC, but this illustrates the impact of non-conference performance on the bigger picture.
Conference USA’s new scheduling formula is an interesting idea, hatched a little after the West Coast Conference made the puzzling decision to go from a perfect round robin schedule with ten teams to go to an unbalanced conference schedule. It’s understandable that they want to do something they think can improve the chances of getting more teams into the NCAA Tournament. No scheduling formula, however, can replace winning non-conference games and against better competition.
