Coaches agree with Pedon's scheduling sermon
MBB: The Illinois State got attention this weekend for discussing scheduling challenges
After Illinois State wrapped up their exhibition game against Illinois on Sunday, Redbird Head Coach Ryan Pedon talked about the challenges of scheduling a Power-4 school during the regular season — with an answer that ended up going viral in college basketball circles.
During Tuesday’s Missouri Valley Conference Media Day, Pedon did not back off his stance.
“It’s not particular just to us,” Pedon said. “I hope I didn’t come across that way, because I do think it’s a real issue in our game right now. We had returning guys, so I get it, but we’re not the only ones in our conference. You look at any of the teams that are projected upper-half (in the Missouri Valley), I’ll bet you they share the same exact frustrations that I had. Yeah, it’s difficult, and it can be frustrating, but the formula is out. I’ve been on the other side of it (as an assistant at Ohio State). I know high-majors, they’re being protected and I don’t fault them for that. Most all these conferences have 20 league games. Then you’ve got the built in, made-for-TV games that all of them are going to play one or two, and then they’re going to play in these high-major exempt tournaments, and there’s three more games. Then they have the conference challenge games that most of these big conferences have. Then you look up and there’s three games left on their whole entire schedule, and they want to play the bottom Quad-4 teams anyway. It’s a formula that unfortunately rewards that type of scheduling. For us mid-majors, we’re being squashed. I don’t think there’s enough narrative out there about it. I think the national pundits are all using the narrative that it’s a terrible thing to expand the tournament, and they’re spreading that like poison. I’m going to fight for the mid-majors here, because I have been on the other side, and a really good team in our conference is a hell of a lot better than an 8-12 team in the Big 10 or the SEC or the Big 12. I will always fight for the mid-majors, and I’ve seen it on both sides, so I think I have a pretty good perspective.”
Murray State Head Coach Ryan Miller said earlier this summer that he was unable to schedule any high-major schools, outside of the SMU game that is the back-end of a home-and-home series that started two years ago. As a former high-major assistant at Creighton, Miller has seen both sides of the scheduling coin, and now he’s on a side that isn’t nearly as fruitful.
“I think Coach Pedon said it perfectly,” Miller said. “They just don’t want to play us. They want to play a Quad-1 game or a Quad-4 game they can win by 20 or 30. I was in that position as an associate head coach at TCU, Creighton and Auburn. You just don’t want to take those chances. If you’re going to take a chance, you might as well play someone that’s a Quad-1 game, so when they look back at your resume and your Quad-1 wins and losses, those Quad-1 losses don’t really hurt you. They want to stay out of Quad-2’s and Quad 3’s. Our challenge is to consistently be in the Quad-1 range — but how do you do that if you can’t schedule anybody? With the Players Era Festival, the event in Vegas, and some of these (multi-team events) where they’re only going to go with high-major teams, they’re really trying to, I wouldn’t say kick you out of the club, but make it very difficult for you to get inside the club. We’ve just got to find creative ways where we can schedule high-major opponents on the road, get bought, whatever it is. We need these opportunities for our guys and for this team, so we have to be creative in our scheduling. It is a huge challenge, and a very difficult challenge.”
The top five teams in the Missouri Valley Conference’s preseason poll are Illinois State, Northern Iowa, Murray State, Belmont and Bradley. Out of those five schools, only Illinois State and Murray State will play high-major teams this season. The Redbirds will play USC on a neutral-floor, albeit in Los Angeles, and the Racers will play the previously scheduled game at SMU.
During the 2019-20 season, just six years ago, those teams played Northwestern, Kansas State, Boston College, Alabama, Tennessee, TCU, West Virginia, South Carolina and Colorado … not to mention Memphis and Cincinnati. With the essential collapse of the Thanksgiving week multi-team events, and general lack of interest from high-majors to schedule good mid-major teams, the best teams in the Missouri Valley are being left in a scheduling lurch.
“I think we’ve played one, I think, Power-5 opponent in three years, and that was Arizona, because we had a real significant connection with someone from our program and theirs, and that’s the only reason that game happened,” Belmont Head Coach Casey Alexander said. “I wouldn’t say we exhaust all options every season to try to obtain those games, but we do enough to reach out and make sure that if somebody’s looking for a team like Belmont, that we’d be willing to do it. I hate it. I think it would be great for our program if we had those opportunities, for a number of reasons, but they are definitely more and more difficult. I would echo everything that Ryan said.”
The question now is how do mid-major’s fight back against the scheduling boogeyman that won’t give them access to games against the country’s best teams? Bradley Head Brian Wardle says that now that mid-major teams seem to fully grasp the rules of engagement when it comes to scheduling, he says the best mid-majors know they have to play each other if there’s any hope for metric-friendly wins.
“I think mid-major coaches now are more willing to play really tough series, because we can’t get any high majors on our schedule,” Wardle said. “(This year, we’ll play) Washington State, San Francisco, playing St. Bonaventure in a neutral site for us, Princeton in the Orlando tournament. We’ve got to go find those teams that we think can contend and win their league, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
KenPom.com currently has the Missouri Valley Conference listed as the 10th best conference in the country, but projects The Valley will earn just one bid to the NCAA Tournament for the fifth-straight year.
Hey is the game Sunday going to be on Espn+ ?