No, the games we played in Oxford were a hosted MTE, which was an old rule that gave you extra “exempt” games but they counted as home for us for NET purposes. Before this year, you had to play these exempt games to get to the max, but the NCAA got rid of that weird rule so now you can just play 32 no matter where/how.
To count as a neutral game (and therefore get the NET benefit), it has to be somewhere other than the permanent home court, so it can’t be at UIC’s home. Anywhere else would work.
Murray State and UCF both have games listed. I’m pretty sure some of these games get co-features, notwithstanding how that might relate to the Miami-UIC game
Any time you can pay $22k plus travel expenses to play Illinois-Chicago in a junior high school gym (Florida State College at Jacksonville South Campus), you gotta do it. The economics of college sports is just hilarious that this is a thing teams do.
My guess is that scheduling is a mess everywhere for good mid majors, everyone is trying to get high majors (with low success) so they keep dates open until relatively late. Then the ones who didn’t get high major games or somewhat prominent tournaments are left with less options and time to put something together.
All due respect to Jacksonville, but it is not a Grade A site for a neutral site game. When compared to Vegas this is a bummer.
Murray State, who I believe projects to be quite good:
Just finished a 3-game exhibition tour of Barcelona, Mykonos, and Paris;
Is part of the Field of 68 Opening Day Marathon
Has a neutral site game vs Georgia Tech (which I assume Murray will be favored in) in Nashville, less than 2 hours from their campus
Now gets scheduled to go to the Bahamas to play NC State following by Wisco/Seton Hall
Respectfully, what the fuck is going on with our scheduling? We bitch and moan about no one playing us last year, but promise nothing short of a neutral site game in Vegas + a road game @ Houston in 2026-2027. None of those things materialize. Instead, our marquee trip is to shithole Jacksonville to play UIC in an arena that looks like it might be condemned before we even arrive.
How can there be such a deep fissure between what one competitive mid-major like Murray State seems able to accomplish with scheduling and Miami’s trash schedule? It’s disappointing to say the least.
I would respectfully disagee that our schedule is awful this year. To the contrary, on paper it looks pretty strong overall. With 22 MAC games that left 10 OOC to schedule and 2 of those were taken care of with the Sun Belt tie-in. So that leaves 8 games. We had two of those 8 already booked as “return” home games with Wright St and EKY. Now down to 6 to schedule. We then pick up a neutral game vs High Point and neutral vs a predicted top tier Missouri Valley Conf (which is a top 10 conference and much higher rated than the MAC) team in UIC. We picked up Evansville and Bellarmine and a nonD1 during X-mas break which most every team in the country has on their schedule. That leaves one game TBD at this point. ESPN Bracketology just listed Wright St, High Point and James Madison as tourney teams. That’s solid mid-major scheduling. Picking up Bellarmine and Evansville is also smart as it should be two wins and one is a home game and one is an easy road game to get to so it helps on the expense side of things. While I’d love to play and get paid by a P5 team it is what it is. Getting worked up about basically one game not being played is not worth it. It’s all about the MAC, period. And, not sure if that Resorts World Classic in Vegas is even happening this year as they have yet to announce any teams or a schedule as of today–so perhaps that MTE just fell through completely?
Either way, its is a MAJOR upgrade compared to last season.
