Sun Belt Goes A Different Route

Conference will play easier schedule to boost NCAA Tournament hopes

June 24, 2007

By Jerry Palm

Special to CSTV.com


	JERRY PALM Jerry runs the web sites CollegeRPI.com and CollegeBCS.com and a CSTV.com analyst. E-mail here!

The Sun Belt conference, which has not placed two teams in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament since 1994, recently announced a plan that the league hopes will change that.

The plan includes the kinds of things you would expect to see, like improved facilities, recruiting and attendance. It also includes one thing that might seem counterintuitive: playing an easier schedule.

Usually when you think about changing a schedule to get into the tournament, you think about playing a tougher schedule, and for individual teams, that is still true. The committee wants to see teams prove themselves against tournament quality opposition outside their own leagues. That applies to major conference teams as well as the non-majors.

However, from the conference point of view, you want to have as many non-conference wins as possible so that the league RPI rating is higher as well as the ratings of the individual teams.

In my last column, I gave you an example of that when I showed the RPI impact of the change in the Big Ten and Big East after teams take two wins off their schedules to play two more conference games. The Sun Belt plan doesn't call for playing fewer conference games but rather more home non-conference games.

Like most non-majors, many Sun Belt teams play a lot of "guarantee" games, where they get paid to go on the road to play a big school and likely get beat. The result is a bad conference record, low RPI ratings, and a one-bid league. The Sun Belt's plan calls for each team to play at least as many games at home or at neutral sites as it does on the road.

"We looked at where teams win games, and teams have a hard time winning on the road," Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters explained. "That doesn't just apply to conferences like ours, which play a lot of guarantee games, but even to leagues like the ACC."

There is a lot of truth to that, of course. Only six leagues in the last 10 years have played less than half of their non-conference games at home and still managed to win 60 percent of those games.

I use 60 percent because that is kind of a magic number. Only one conference that won 60 percent of its non-conference games failed to place multiple teams in the NCAA tournament (24/25, excluding the BCS conferences). The odds are still pretty good at 56 percent (32/36) and not too bad at 52 percent either (45/57), but after that, the chances drop dramatically. Note that I only count games against teams that count in the RPI in these stats.

As Waters puts it, "Ultimately, [getting in the tournament] is about winning games."

Seven of the league's 13 teams played more than half of their games on the road last season, with the most egregious offenders being new members Florida Atlantic (two home games and eight road games) and Florida International (two home games and six road games).

As a whole, the Sun Belt played 56 percent of its games on the road, which is the highest percentage since I began keeping data in the 1993-94 season. The league's non-conference winning percentage of .386 is also the lowest in that time. Obviously, something has to change.

The Sun Belt is going to give this idea three years to work initially, although the scheduling aspect of it may not take shape until the 2008-09 season because the plan was introduced so late in the scheduling process.

While scheduling is an important part of this plan, the other facets are important too.

Recruiting has to pick up because no plan will work if you don't have the players. The facilities have to improve to help attract the players and the fans have to come out and support the teams.

Taking it a little easier on the scheduling will help get things started because it should bring a few more wins, and nothing breeds success like success.