A better college basketball scheduling plan, Vol. 2: Challenge Week
Well, they don't call this Schedules by Will do they
The college basketball schedule, at large, is an unbalanced mess. I know you’re shocked to hear this, given that you’re reading a newsletter about college basketball and are already quite aware of it. Pre-conference tournaments, 74 of KenPom’s top 100 FanMatch Rating (just a thing that tells you how good a game is on paper) games were played during the 17-week regular season. While conference play is pretty steady, November and December are…well, a mess.
We can fix this. Or so I think. College basketball already does a good job of making Thanksgiving week a marquee event, and it’s gotten better at producing marquee mid-December games. What if we could extend this to other, less fortunate parts of the schedule within reason?
I’ve been pondering this for a few weeks now as I think about changes I would (or wouldn’t) make as a theoretical college basketball commissioner. It’s very complicated to ‘fix’ anything that involves 363 teams with more likely coming, but to put it simply, I am stupid enough to try. Failing is fine by me; at least this is an idea that I’ve thought about a little.
So: I have an idea. I want to dominate an entire week of a subset of sports conversation, during spots in the calendar that normally don’t have much competition in them. Here’s how we do it.
Create eight 8-team tournaments, two for each rough geographic quadrant of the United States. Given that no current preseason tournament has a field of greater than eight, I think we have to stick to that restriction. A 16-team tournament either means four games in four days or some sort of weird split-up structure of four in six that loses the momentum of the tournament itself. I would like larger fields, but I don’t think they’re possible in November or December, whatever week we’d choose.
Still, what we want is a mini-NCAA Tournament (of sorts) months before the actual Tournament. My concept is less a full-on Tournament and more of a modified Champions League. As such:
All 32 conferences get at least one team in the field.
The Big Six conferences - ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, Pac-12, SEC - are limited to a maximum of four teams.
The Fair Four (?) conferences - Mountain West, West Coast, American, and Missouri Valley - are guaranteed a minimum of two teams. They’re also restricted to the four-team maximum, but it’s generally unlikely they’ll threaten that limit.
The other 22 conferences can get a second team in if they have a second team good enough, but at minimum, all 32 conferences are represented.
The other aspect of the above prompt is sort of a Doing The Best We Can thing. 80% of the US population lives east of Wichita Falls, TX, which is a rough geographical midline of the States. The same rough percentage goes for schools, too. If we were to draw true quadrants of who could/could not be involved, it would be pretty stupid real quick. So here’s my proposal of The Best We Can:
One quadrant for the entire western half of the United States. Yes, this is awful, but again, doing what makes the most sense.
One quadrant for the East Coast.
One quadrant for the Midwest/furthest west schools available.
One quadrant for the South-ish.
Here’s how it sort of looks.
Those last three, and really all four, are quite vague. It’s for a lot of reasons, but a key one is that conference realignment has more or less ruined regionality for a lot of major conferences. The Big 12 would have a team in the East Coast quadrant (West Virginia), Midwest (Kansas), South (Houston), and West (Texas Tech) in theory. But, again: this is the best we can draw up.
Lastly, each quadrant gets two 8-team tournaments. This is a way of getting around the 16-team barrier. We’ll play the first three games back-to-back-to-back, like you would with any preseason tournament. This will be held at a pair of neutral sites, just like we do with the actual March tournament. I would prefer true home/road games spanning a full week, but it doesn’t make much sense for travel expenses. Smaller schools save money by only making one round trip. Bigger schools can pull it off, but not every school in this tournament is big.
Then, each 8-team tournament winner will play each other 3-4 days later in a true home/road game. Home court is decided by point differential. Does this open our mini-tourney up to running up the score? Yes, but as has been pointed out numerous times in the last couple of years, the NET and most metric systems encourage running up the score anyway.
Partner with various Legends of the Game in designing the fields. I think we’re well aware that preseason metrics are far from perfect, just like the preseason AP Poll is far from perfect. Still, they give us a good amount of insight into what’s potentially coming down the pipe.
Our Year One Challenge Week Committee would theoretically be constituted by the following luminaries: Ken Pomeroy (obviously), Bart Torvik, Matt Norlander, and Kevin Sweeney. Pomeroy and Torvik are there for their metrics, which can help build an initial field; Norlander and Sweeney both watch more college basketball than seemingly any other living person. (I also strongly considered Sean Paul for this role.) Together, the combination of stats and writer research could give us the strongest games possible.
I don’t want rich guys in suits running things; I want people who actually care about college basketball’s well-being to do it instead. I’d also acknowledge right here that this is a horrifically non-diverse committee that needs an overhaul and would love to hear some other suggestions. This list entirely being middle-aged white guys is pretty sad, but they’re the four personalities in the sport whose opinions I trust most.
Schedule option #1: Block out the first post-conference championship week for college football for your tournament(s). This is very school-by-school dependent, but based on a quick sampling, the average Finals Week this past winter was December 12-16, 2022. Conference championships for football were all finished by December 3, 2022. That leaves a week-long gap in the sports calendar. The NBA and NHL have just started and aren’t gathering full attention yet. The NFL will have a game on Thursday, but otherwise you’re without competition.
That’s where our tournament can come in. From December 5-7 (as an example), we play the first tournaments. On December 10, we hold the Quadrant Championships. Could this be done better? Sure, but I am merely a blogger and not a professional journalist or whatever. I get to push out whatever stupid idea I’ve got cooking at the time.
This past year, that week had a few good games, but nothing during the week that was a stop-everything-you’re-doing game. Just two of KenPom’s top 100 FanMatch games this year happened from December 5-9. The date of December 10 added an additional game, but think about it this way: there are 17 weeks of regular season play prior to basketball’s conference championship week. In theory, a balanced schedule would give you six top 100 games a week. This week - essentially college basketball’s big chance to steal the stage, however temporarily - gave you three.
Our system hopefully produces more interesting games all week long. That’s the goal, anyway.
Schedule option #2: This is how you open the season. In the previous volume of this, centered around my proposal for BracketBusters 2.0, I re-posted this chart that Heat Check CBB put together last October about the opening week of the season:
Now, it obviously is worth noting that last year was relatively unique. College basketball began its season on Monday, November 7; November 8 was Election Day for U.S. midterms, which included a lot of pivotal House and Senate races. The push to get college athletes to vote is a good one, and we don’t want to mess with that. However, I think there’s another question we could potentially ponder: why are we starting the season this early?
Considering that Election Day is essentially always the first Tuesday in November (minus last year), I think it would be fair to not start the season until after Election Day at minimum. For example, looking at college basketball’s 2023-24 schedule, why not wait until November 10 (a Friday) to begin the season? Why not November 13? And why not open the season with a tournament like this?
The problem with this option is that it would lead directly into a lot of preseason tournaments that already exist, but to be honest, I’m not sold that some of these should exist. I covered Tennessee when they played in the Emerald Coast Classic in late 2019, an event that somehow roped in three Top 25 teams. It was played in a high school gym and multiple marquee games were streamed in 360p on a YouTube channel. Do we need that? I mean, maybe, but also…
Acknowledging the flaws. Now, there’s some significant drawbacks to this concept. By holding it in early December and not over Thanksgiving week, people are less likely to be able to tune in for a random 2:30 PM ET game on a Tuesday. I would counter this by saying not many people tune in for those anyway. Your average college basketball viewer with a day job (hello) is working for those Thanksgiving Mondays and Tuesdays if not Wednesdays. What’s fundamentally different about holding it in early December, aside from marketing?
Another issue: teams may already be in preseason tournaments. If so, they can choose to opt out of this and play in those instead, but in theory, we have the appropriate funding to at least make it a tougher decision than it normally would be. Only a select few of the preseason tournaments are actually set more than a few months out in advance. If our organizing committee spends June and July getting teams to commit, we’ll have a fully-formed field before several other preseason tournaments have finalized theirs.
Along with that, there will be/would be complaints about attendance for these games being difficult. Unfortunately, I’d have to counter this by saying the type of people that can attend the Maui Invitational or the Battle 4 Atlantis are exactly the type of people that can attend this. They have money to spend, they can get out of work, and they can schedule time off where necessary. Your average working-class individual cannot attend these tournaments in the first place. I’d like to have some sort of organization or committee we partner with to make ticket prices as affordable/cheap as is plausible, but I imagine it unfortunately wouldn’t make much of a difference.
The issues with the attendance thing is that these preseason tournaments are already held in tiny venues in far-off locales. Maui’s main gym has a capacity of 2,400 and only touches that number for the marquee game(s). Atlantis is held in a literal hotel ballroom. I don’t think we’re touching a third rail to say that attendance for these events is already pretty pointless. They’re TV productions for TV viewers.
Lastly, the travel costs for schools involved could get rough. If you’re a small school that posts a surprising run to the final, you have to organize hotel rooms, a plane (or bus), a practice spot, and much more in the span of 48 hours at most. If you’d like for your team to not be exhausted, it’s more like 24-36 hours. That appears scary on paper. It gets less scary when you actually talk to the Directors of Basketball Operations at these schools, who are bizarrely good at organizing all of the above things in tiny time spans. After all, it cannot be worse than doing it during peak COVID.
After all of that, we have to produce a field. Going entirely on Torvik’s active preseason projections is not 100% ideal, but it’s a great tool to work with. (Plus, he’s a member of the fake committee.) A reminder of our restrictions:
All 32 conferences get at least one team in the field.
The Big Six conferences - ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, Pac-12, SEC - are limited to a maximum of four teams.
The Fair Four (?) conferences - Mountain West, West Coast, American, and Missouri Valley - are guaranteed a minimum of two teams. They’re also restricted to the four-team maximum, but it’s generally unlikely they’ll threaten that limit.
The other 22 conferences can get a second team in if they have a second team good enough, but at minimum, all 32 conferences are represented.
Here’s our field. An important note: if I was able to confirm that a team is already committed to a Thanksgiving-week event, I held them out of the field here. This is just an example, of course; I can provide a fully-available one, too.
West Bracket 1 (winner plays the champion of West Bracket 2):
West Bracket 2:
East Coast Bracket 1:
East Bracket 2:
South Bracket 1:
South Bracket 2:
Midwest Bracket 1:
Midwest Bracket 2:
This is a bit of a mess, but think about this hypothetical Saturday of quadrant championships:
Arizona vs. Saint Mary’s (CA)
West Virginia vs. UConn
Duke vs. Houston (!)
Creighton vs. Michigan State
That’s a Saturday. If only.
Best of luck to everyone in our fake brackets, and best of luck to anyone who read this full newsletter. Will anything like this exist, ever? Of course not. Then again, we came oh-so-close to a 22-conference in-season tournament of sorts, so anything is possible. We’ve just gotta dream.