We should have Ohio’s MAC invite in the Myrtle Beach.
Yeah, I think so. After Hoeppner left, Miami went from really good to not so good to a sugar high then G*d-awful. Similar path happened with MBB after Charlie Coles retired, now both sports are performing really well.
Just my $.02. though…
Dam Right.
We should copy the Philly Big 5 Classic in SW Ohio. Teams would be Miami, Wright St, Dayton, Xavier, UC and Ohio State. Divide into two divisions and each team gets a home and home in pool play. Then you play 3 games at a neutral site on a Saturday in December. Could rotate the neutral site between Cincy, Dayton and Columbus.
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If Ohio State doesn’t want to play, then just add NKU. Make a Cincinnati division of Xavier, Cincinnati and NKU and a Dayton division of Dayton, Wright State and Miami.
UC/Xavier and Miami/Wright St games would be part of pool play, so no change to the current schedule. UC has had a home and home with NKU for the past several years too. Plus, Miami/Dayton is a good rivalry and adding the Dayton/Wright State rivalry would be great too.
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X, UD and UC have zero interest in elevating another competitive program in SW Ohio. We couldn’t even keep the Victory Bell going.
Doing something with Wright, NKU and then something like IUPUI or Indiana st or Evansville or Cleveland st may be more realistic but not sure it brings more juice than a random other exempt tourney.
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What you’re talking about is the mythical Miami Valley League of Miami, Dayton, Wright State, Xavier, and UC. Miami is willing to play anyone, anytime. BUT as Hoosierhawk pointed out, the other schools have no interest in playing Miami or boosting other programs.
Here’s the thing, you want other teams to play you, win. Screw bitching about who Miami is not playing, beat who’s on the schedule and win the conference tournament. Score a lot of points the whole game.
Do that a few years in a row and grow the team. Leave the other schools looking in at the NCAA’s. Sure they’ll complain about how “weak the MAC is” but they’ll be sitting at home or in the NIT and Miami will be playing in the Big Dance.
Maybe get through the first weekend a few times and keep winning and growing. Sure there’ll be distractors, “Well, we were good a lot earlier than you were.” Yup! And how many recent NCAA bids have you earned and won games in vs not?
A lot of people on this board don’t remember how hard is was for Xavier to get looked at in the old Mid-Continent Conference. X even brought in Loyola Marymount (see Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble) to play at the old Cincinnati Gardens. (I’m still pissed I wasn’t allowed to go.) But Coach Gillen kept at it and in 1990 they broke thru beating Dikembe Mutombo and Alonzo Mourning in the second round at the Hoosier Dome. Instant credibility for being an up and comer and a lot of schools came in to play them. X could get whoever they wanted.
So focus on winning the MAC. Get to the dance and hang banners. “Teams will come, Ray. They’ll come to Oxford for reasons they don’t know why. But they’ll bus in and play at Miami University in men’s basketball.”
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I realize my idea is a pipe dream, but I hope Saylor/Steele are at least having the conversations about playing local teams. UC has had a road game at Miami or NKU for 3 of the past 4 years and has played Dayton at US Bank arena the last 2 years. Their schedule wouldn’t change much under my proposal.
Xavier and Dayton could be a problem, but if their conference mates Villanova, St Joes and LaSalle are willing to do it in Philly, then maybe they would consider it.
I don’t like playing random teams at a far off MTE where 95% of fans will never be able to attend. Doing a local MTE would bring back the local rivalries and would be a bone for the fans, who are becoming an afterthought in college athletics.
Along the lines of our discussion, High Point’s coach asked about scheduling power teams:
https://x.com/JoshGrahamShow/status/1902808452709355590
Akron (and now Miami) are definitely in this same situation. Too good for teams to want to risk playing even at home and yet too “bad” to benefit from that risk as they won’t be Q1 games.
What is MWC recipe for scheduling? It works for them.
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The MWC recipe for scheduling is that they play a ton of games at elevation, where they have the advantage.
I guess that could be true because you need a pressure cooker when at altitude.
The Mountain West has 7 teams in the NET top 100, so scheduling a top half MWC team is almost certainly going to be a Quad 1 game. Since that is the case, its worth P4 team to schedule them.
The MAC, on the other hand, have 8 teams 200+ and only Akron in the top 100. In previous years, we almost always never have more than 1 top 100 team. So its a bit of a chicken/egg situation: the MAC can’t improve because scheduling good MAC teams is high risk/low reward. And because we can’t get those games, we can’t improve our NET to make the risk-reward more appealing.
And this is all by design by the way, its not an accident. Its why college hoops has slid into the state its in where mid-major at-larges have basically disappeared outside the MWC which has carved out a nice little niche as the top mid-major.
Not even traditional top mid-major conferences like the MVC, A10 and AAC can get at-larges anymore barring fire hot team losing in the tournament. The NET system and new predictive metrics were all designed to favor the big money conferences.
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Its not often explained, they just throw out the term, so here is how “Quad 1” games are counted:
- Quadrant 1: Home 1-30, Neutral 1-50, Away 1-75
So if you are a P4 team and thinking about going on the road, you want to be damn sure that team is in NET top 75, otherwise you are giving away a home game for basically no reward. That’s why the MWC can actually schedule some decent teams. If you’re an actual near bubble P4 type team, the chance to go to a 65-75 ranked NET team and get a Q1 quality win can be enticing.
That’s why a Clemson may go to Boise or Ole Miss may bring Colorado St to play a “neutral” game in some random town in Mississippi or Iowa played Utah St in a “neutral” game in Missouri like they did this year. Its all gaming the system they created.
By the same token, Q3 games at home go 76-160, so if you are bubble type team, no way in hell you want to bring an Akron or Kent St or Miami to your house and risk a Q3 loss which really hurts you tournament time.
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This is why the top 64 teams who don’t make the ncaa need to create another tournament that’s identical to it in every regard. With proper attendance it would create change. But you’d need a lot of schools to be united on it.
Good stuff
I listened to Mark Adams on something Miami posted this week and he said that the gap between the haves and have nots increased dramatically this year
That this year only 10% of non-power 4s beat power 4s vs a normal average of 15%
And the average margin of victory increased from 15 points to 20 points.
It was the end of the MAC multiple bids years ago- we were close in the 2000s. But it could be the end for the A10-AAC and eventually MWC once they split. Those leagues might get a really good champ in that loses in their tournament
With the CBC, the powers that be have decided to actually go the other direction. They’ve found in general, the fans of those big schools don’t care about the actual best teams, they’ll come for names they recognize (or that’s the theory at least). So they created a tournament where they can totally shut out small schools and just include P4 and P4 adjacent teams with FOX tv deals, even if those schools are clearly not what would have been considered post season quality in the past.
Unless there’s a shift in the landscape that causes the super conferences to break up, we are almost certainly heading for a world where there is never more than 2-3 “mid-majors” with at-larges anymore and if they succeed with the CBC, there won’t even be an NIT option for small schools as a consolation. The P4 see the value of “Cinderella’s” but they don’t see a reason to share more than the bare minimum, and honestly, why would they?
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Right. But my post says the smaller conferences need to create their own tourney to control their destiny so that if their teams don’t get in they have something with scale to be a part of. If the ncaa is cooked, work with private equity to do it. Then fuck with the bs metrics and call the tourney the National Excellence Tournament (NET) for short, and then avoid using a NET ranking for any selection purposes.
Ps, fans would watch this. If your school and 63 others are playing, you’d care.
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I’m not sure they would. The NIT is in full panic over the tournament this year with all the big names opting out and either not playing postseason or going to the CBC. The NIT has effectively been turned into your idea and there are already rumblings that if the CBC succeeds and becomes a yearly staple, it can’t survive. They already threw in the towel on MSG years ago. The CIT threw in the towel this year and the CBI couldn’t fill their field.
The NIT and CBI are not like my idea. Both have very limited fields and are exclusionary for different reasons. NIT was for us. CBI is a scam as they just want your money and thus, not legitimate. Like getting into a party school with a 2.2 gpa
. I’m talking about a 64 team event. You could royally mess with the NCAA tourney and offer NIL prize money to each winning team every round with more each round. NCAA can’t do that. Look, it would require all the schools in lesser conferences to unite (that’s prolly hard) but if it did happen, to me, not only would it draw fans (and again, if your team didn’t get in the show and you’re next 64, you get an invite even big schools.) it might actually force some change. Tourney needs to expend. There are 360 D1 teams and 68 isn’t enough.