A better college basketball scheduling plan, vol. 1: bringing back BracketBusters
Within reason? Within reason!
Starved for content, in the midst of a terminal offseason, amidst demands from subscribers, we press on. Pressing on is my middle name! It’s not, but perhaps it will be one day. They let you change your name now, it’s pretty easy.
Anyway, this is generally the time of the year where I think about long-term solutions to problems that may or may not exist within college basketball. I do think there’s one that does exist: the schedule. Something nearly everyone agrees on is that some part of the schedule, whether it be the opening week or the many events in between, simply isn’t what it used to be. Data can support part of this:
But a lot of this is vibes-based, which works just as well.
There are a myriad of fixes or events I would implement, which we’ll explore over the next several weeks. We’ll start small today, though, focusing on an event that’s been gone for a decade now that I grew up loving.
Idea #1: BracketBusters comes back.
For the uninitiated, BracketBusters was a decade-long scheduling series on ESPN that made good use of taking a February weekend to pit what we’ve long termed ‘mid-majors’ against one another. The concept here was two-fold:
We’re going to give these teams a chance at another quality win against an out-of-conference opponent;
We’re going to also give these teams perhaps the biggest national television viewing audience they’d have before a theoretical NCAA Tournament appearance.
By the time BracketBusters wrapped in 2013, it had ballooned from an initial field of 18 teams (9 games) to 122 teams (61 games), many of which simply got lost in the shuffle and proved to be an inconvenience for those involved. For example, here’s a tidbit from The Athletic’s story on the 2006 event:
Smart was an assistant at Akron when the Zips traveled to Nevada for a 2006 game. The Wolf Pack, who had Nick Fazekas and Ramon Sessions, won by 27 points, and Akron flew commercial out of Sacramento the next day. That meant a 4 a.m. bus ride over the Sierra Nevada mountains. “There was this crazy blizzard, and we’re seeing all these cars sliding off road,” Smart says. “At one point, our bus driver stopped to put chains on the tires. All that just to go out there and have a tough go of it against a good team.”
That’s obviously not ideal. In its final edition, BracketBusters was sending teams from South Dakota to Kentucky, from upstate New York to Southern Indiana, from Stockton, CA to Kalamazoo, MI. It had far outgrown the initial setting and initial goals into another unnecessarily-bloated in-season tournament.
So: we’re going to fix that. Well, as fixed as we can make it. Here’s the plan in brief:
Only single-bid leagues are fully allowed in…but we’re pushing all of the 2-3 bid leagues to the top network their contracts allow. This is going to eliminate the Big Six (you know them) from competition, but what it will also do is make the next four conferences - Mountain West, American, West Coast, Atlantic 10 - put the best game available from their conference schedule on the top available network that weekend. The Mountain West could have San Diego State/Boise State on CBS with a tidy 4 PM ET start. The new-look American: FAU/Memphis on ESPN. Saint Mary’s/Gonzaga on ABC. Dayton/Saint Louis on ESPN, or if you must, ESPN2.
The alternate, and more realistic version of this, is to build in a flex spot for television in each conference to ensure that conference’s best game of the year is on the best possible network. Something like Saint Mary’s/Gonzaga or, you know, a team that just played in the national title game should probably be on network television. Instead I’m sure the suits who run these things will toss SMC/Gonzaga on at 11 PM Eastern on ESPN2 while San Diego State/Boise gets a nice 10 PM tipoff on a Thursday on CBS Sports Network.
The remaining 22 leagues build a flex date into their schedule. Do you see your conference on here?
If you do, build a weekend without any scheduled in-conference games in mid-February. (We’ll say that it would’ve been February 18-19, 2023 this past season.) If you normally play 18 games, for example, you can either move your first conference game up a tad or you could schedule 17, have the 18th TBD, and play that 18th game between the remaining available teams. 6 days before that weekend date - February 12 in our fake world here - the #1 team in the conference standings, even if it’s by tiebreaker, will be your participant in BracketBusters 2.0.
Now, the #1 team has nearly a full week to prepare for their new opponent - more than they have for any game in the actual NCAA Tournament - and will set travel plans. In our fake world, these games will garner sponsorships, and instead of lining the pockets of execs we’re going to sent a significant portion of this money to schools that are traveling to help cover their costs/encourage involvement.
(Quick alternate version here: all conferences could hold an out-of-conference game this week, but not technically be involved in the main BracketBusters 2.0 challenge. I just didn’t believe it to be that interesting to pursue that route. The best possible path here, if I had to guess, is to move conference play up a week or so for everyone to accommodate.)
Is this pretty convoluted? Obviously. So was the initial idea, and no idea will ever be perfect.
Schedule 11 games, with 22 teams involved, adhering as best as possible to regional involvements and historic strengths. Ideally, you’re roughly breaking down these 22 conferences into a few batches: those that regularly rise among the top of the pack but not on the MWC tier; those that can possess a wide range of NCAAT entries; those that don’t really make much of an impact in March.
The first batch is easier to sell than the second and third, but we want them all to make sense. At first glance, we can build some basic conference versus conference structures:
Missouri Valley vs. MAC
Conference USA vs. Sun Belt
Ivy vs. Southern Conference
Summit vs. Big Sky
CAA vs. Atlantic Sun
WAC vs. Big West
Horizon vs. Ohio Valley
MAAC vs. Patriot
But it does get pretty complicated:
America East vs. NEC?
Big South vs. MEAC?
SWAC vs. Southland?
That’s the best I’m able to come up with. You could also get a little more scatter-shot, but that’s our basic outline. The team with the superior conference winning percentage gets to be the home team. Why? I don’t know, seems as good as any other arbitrary decider. (I’m also imagining that no neutral site works for 22 separate teams.) Our example game list then gets to be as follows, based on last year’s KenPom rankings and conference standings at the time.
Game 1: #85 Drake (21-6, 12-4 MVC) at #75 Kent State (20-5, 10-2 MAC)
Game 2: #84 Southern Miss (23-4, 12-2 SB) at #34 Florida Atlantic (24-2, 14-1 CUSA)
Game 3: #76 Yale (17-6, 7-3 Ivy) at #86 Furman (21-6, 12-2 SC)
Game 4: #126 Eastern Washington (19-7, 13-0 BSky) at #49 Oral Roberts (23-4, 14-0 Summit)
Game 5: #94 Hofstra (19-8, 12-2 CAA) at #136 Kennesaw State (20-7, 12-2 ASun)
Game 6: #83 Utah Valley (20-6, 11-2 WAC) at #92 UC Santa Barbara (20-4, 11-2 BW)
Game 7: #272 Morehead State (17-10, 10-4 OVC) at #222 Milwaukee (18-8, 12-4 Horizon)
Game 8: #82 Iona (18-7, 11-3 MAAC) at #117 Colgate (19-8, 13-1 Patriot)
Game 9: #332 Merrimack (11-16, 9-4 NEC) at #127 Vermont (15-10, 9-2 AE)
Game 10: #176 UNC Asheville (20-7, 12-2 Big South) at #237 Howard (15-10, 7-1 MEAC)
Game 11: #193 Texas A&M Corpus Christi (17-9, 10-3 Southland) at #255 Alcorn State (13-11, 10-2 SWAC)
Are these games perfect? No, of course not. But think about it this way: on that list, there’s 13 of those conference’s eventual 22 champions in a mid-season tournament of sorts. For several teams involved, these would have been hugely important games. Plus, it’s simply a fun exercise to see what could’ve been.
With our schedule, we strategically unload a three-day block of games meant to showcase as many teams as possible. This was the first post-Super Bowl weekend, which is generally when casual college basketball fans begin caring about the sport again. Critically, this also is not yet at the point where the NHL/NBA seasons are all that close to their respective playoffs, and spring training for MLB has yet to begin while football is done in the States. Plan this correctly, and you could produce the sport’s first pre-March premier weekend of games.
At the same time, we recognize that bigger-dollar programs - including the top 10 conferences in America - are all still going on, doing their usual things. We’ll respect those programs’ wishes to be on national TV, but the plan here is to at least feature the key games here (i.e., games 1-6 plus 8) on ESPN or ESPN2. In real life, only one of these teams - Florida Atlantic, #25 - was ranked in the AP Poll. We’ll assume that they get the biggest TV audience of the group.
This leads us to the following theoretical schedule. Also, an additional piece I’m striving to keep: I do not want these games on ESPN+. They’ll be simulcast there if you want them, but they need to be on cable to achieve the desired result.
FRIDAY:
7 PM ET: Iona at Colgate, ESPN2. The NBA has the All-Star Celebrity Game on Friday night on main ESPN, but ESPN2 is left up for grabs. We’re putting Rick Pitino in the spotlight here in a game of two elite 13-14 seed types. Plus, we’re assuming actual basketball fans do not watch the celebrity game.
8 PM ET: Morehead State at Milwaukee, ESPNU. Someone kind of has to get dumped to a secondary network here, but this does avoid overlap and ensures the second half will be the main CBB affair of the night.
10:30 PM ET: Utah Valley at UC Santa Barbara, ESPN2. This is an excellent game where both teams can pick up Quadrant 2 wins. Our only obstacle in putting this on is that women’s gymnastics is already contracted to be aired from 9-10:30, but I have no problem shoving lacrosse out at 10:30. Go away.
SATURDAY:
12 PM ET: Yale at Furman, ESPN2. Banger. We’re assuming we are allowed but one true ESPN spot this day, and it will be used shortly.
2 PM ET: Southern Miss at #25 Florida Atlantic, ESPN. No comment really needed here, this should be the most hyped game of the bunch on paper.
2 PM ET: Eastern Washington at Oral Roberts, ESPN2. I’m treating this as our main block of the day: 2 PM. Strange? Sure. Is there anything else on? Not really, as the best game on at this time on the real February 18 was, I guess, Iowa State/Kansas State. Not really that interesting. So we’re plotting our takeover.
2 PM ET: Texas A&M Corpus Christi at Alcorn State, ESPNU.
4 PM ET: Drake at Kent State, ESPN2. Our second-best game of the weekend, I think.
4 PM ET: Merrimack at Vermont, ESPNU. Fine, whatever, gotta use it.
6 PM ET: UNC Asheville at Howard, ESPN2. I want to ensure that at least one of our two HBCU-hosted games gets a real ESPN/2 showcase. This is the superior of the two games.
6 PM ET: Hofstra at Kennesaw State, ESPNU. However, it doesn’t mean that Kennesaw gets shafted; this would’ve been their first game of the entire season that wasn’t shoved to ESPN+.
This is far from a perfect example, but it’s something I’ve been stewing on. At a time when basketball below the top 10 leagues has had more March success than ever before. The 22 conferences involved here have combined for 32 (!) NCAA Tournament wins over the last five Tournaments. That’s an average of 6.4 per tourney, which may seem like nothing but is quickly beginning to add up. (They put up a total of eight wins this year.)
While we’re at this pivotal point of hoops history, it would be very useful to begin showcasing these schools again, or at least giving them a greater audience than they’re used to. Who says no, aside from the elites who’ve always said no to stuff like this anyway? Another try is worth it.
More ideas to come in following weeks.