Bracketology- Bids by Conference

[MCMLXXX]

Conferences at Bracketologists

[DeepGreen]

Wow!  The American is not even a "mini" power conference.

[BigWillie]

33 minutes ago, DeepGreen said:

Wow!  The American is not even a "mini" power conference.

Kinda sad to see the conference we left be above us.

[greenminer]

It's an awful year for the American.

[GMG_Dallas]

Conference name is meaningless if the teams aren't performing. Y'all want more bids? Go to the new Pac. Otherwise, we'll get left behind. Not enough money? AD needs to remember to make money you have to invest money first.

[MeanGreenGlory]

Yeah, the new PAC has always intrigued me, but this kind of seals the deal for me. 

Basketball has been our strongest sport since the early 2000s. It's time we lean into it and join a league where our program has a better shot at thriving and making the tournament more regularly. On the basketball front, it's a no-brainer at this point.

On the football front, competing against WSU, OSU, Boise St., SDSU, etc. is same/same if not slightly better to me than competing against Army, Memphis, Tulane, and USF most years.

I get that the media deal isn't locked in, but I think they have a better shot at landing a better media deal than the American will when the American's comes up for renewal. 

If I'm Mosley, I'm trying to make the move now and leveraging the DFW market and Central time zone as negotiation points to get the PAC to help with our American buy out. 

[meangreenfaninno]

1 hour ago, MeanGreenGlory said:

Yeah, the new PAC has always intrigued me, but this kind of seals the deal for me. 

Basketball has been our strongest sport since the early 2000s. It's time we lean into it and join a league where our program has a better shot at thriving and making the tournament more regularly. On the basketball front, it's a no-brainer at this point.

On the football front, competing against WSU, OSU, Boise St., SDSU, etc. is same/same if not slightly better to me than competing against Army, Memphis, Tulane, and USF most years.

I get that the media deal isn't locked in, but I think they have a better shot at landing a better media deal than the American will when the American's comes up for renewal. 

If I'm Mosley, I'm trying to make the move now and leveraging the DFW market and Central time zone as negotiation points to get the PAC to help with our American buy out. 

You make a good case!

[ColoradoEagle]

The AAC as a conference needs to schedule better. 

Just looking at our schedule, we should only have two of these: Wayland Baptist, Evansville, Texas Wesleyan, Mississippi Valley State, Houston Christian, High Point, App State. A bunch of no names that completely ruin our SOS. I get needing a tune up game or two to begin the season, but after that it needs to be balls to the wall in out of conference. The AAC is too weak, and by the time we hit that schedule (for the most part) there's nowhere to go but down.

Edited Thursday at 08:37 PM by ColoradoEagle

[GMG_Dallas]

58 minutes ago, ColoradoEagle said:

The AAC as a conference needs to schedule better. 

Just looking at our schedule, we should only have two of these: Wayland Baptist, Evansville, Texas Wesleyan, Mississippi Valley State, Houston Christian, High Point, App State. A bunch of no names that completely ruin our SOS. I get needing a tune up game or two to begin the season, but after that it needs to be balls to the wall in out of conference. The AAC is too weak, and by the time we hit that schedule (for the most part) there's nowhere to go but down.

Absolutely agree. Looking at Memphis, if they take a couple conference losses, it's OK because their OOC is good enough to make-up for it. Our OOC is such that we can't afford any conference losses. I believe we're good enough to make the tournament but our resume suggests we haven't proven it and with our OOC, we were barely had the opportunity to prove it. 

[GrandGreen]

22 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

Absolutely agree. Looking at Memphis, if they take a couple conference losses, it's OK because their OOC is good enough to make-up for it. Our OOC is such that we can't afford any conference losses. I believe we're good enough to make the tournament but our resume suggests we haven't proven it and with our OOC, we were barely had the opportunity to prove it. 

The problem is and should be obvious, good teams seldom schedule oc away games.  Without a name like Memphis and/or money like Memphis, scheduling upper tier or even pier schools to games in Denton is very difficult.  

In fact, NT has been so good lately, that it is hard to even get decent away oc games.  

 

[GMG_Dallas]

54 minutes ago, GrandGreen said:

The problem is and should be obvious, good teams seldom schedule oc away games.  Without a name like Memphis and/or money like Memphis, scheduling upper tier or even pier schools to games in Denton is very difficult.  

In fact, NT has been so good lately, that it is hard to even get decent away oc games.  

 

Then play them in their house. An away loss at Kentucky is worth more than a home win versus Mississippi Valley. I'd rather have 4 road games against high-major schools than play bottom of the barrel schools at home. If you split those road games vs high majors, that likely puts you at 2-2 in Quad 1 games which would look great on our resume. A Quad 1 road game just needs to ge top 75. At our house they have to be top 30. It's almost more beneficial to be on the road because there's more room for error. Neutral site opponents need to be top 50 which is why so many schools do those tournaments. There's a ton of room for error. You just need to go .500.

Edited 21 hours ago by GMG_Dallas

[emmitt01]

Wow, a whole 2 SEC teams are projected to miss the NCAA tournament 

[GrandGreen]

7 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

Then play them in their house. An away loss at Kentucky is worth more than a home win versus Mississippi Valley. I'd rather have 4 road games against high-major schools than play bottom of the barrel schools at home. If you split those road games vs high majors, that likely puts you at 2-2 in Quad 1 games which would look great on our resume. A Quad 1 road game just needs to ge top 75. At our house they have to be top 30. It's almost more beneficial to be on the road because there's more room for error. Neutral site opponents need to be top 50 which is why so many schools do those tournaments. There's a ton of room for error. You just need to go .500.

I guess you didn't read the second sentence.  The problem is that Kentucky or the like is highly unlikely to want to play NT.  Too much risk even at their place of losing to a nobody in their view.  

 

[emmitt01]

Wow, a whole 2 SEC teams are projected to miss the NCAA tournament 

[GMG_Dallas]

3 hours ago, GrandGreen said:

I guess you didn't read the second sentence.  The problem is that Kentucky or the like is highly unlikely to want to play NT.  Too much risk even at their place of losing to a nobody in their view.  

 

I don't believe this for one second. This stuff is about Quad 1 and Quad 2 games. That's what resumes boil down to. It doesn't matter what the school is named. Alabama hosted McNeese State this year who's NET is about what ours is and made the tournament last year.

You look at most other AAC schools and their OOC was similar to ours. My opinion is this is why our coaches don't want to schedule tough OOC:

"There several performance incentives included in the contract, including one tied to the number of wins UNT posts in a season. Hodge will receive $7,500 if UNT wins 20 games, $17,500 if the Mean Green reach the 25-win mark and 37,500 for winning 30 games."

https://dentonrc.com/sports/colleges/mean_green/unt-new-basketball-coach-ross-hodge-agree-to-basic-terms-of-five-year-deal/article_32af169c-33ec-5e85-8226-5637457e6cc5.html

They schedule a couple tough tests to appease the fans and "prepare the team" and then load up with winnable games. High major schools don't care about wins, it's all about winning the conference, making the tournament, and then winning that. Playing North Texas doesn't change that either way. Schedule them. FAU played at UCF and Michigan State this year. So can North Texas.

[CMJ]

I do think we could stand to add some difficulty, but there's a fine line though, because you also don't want a Vic Trilli OOC slate.  We played anyone and everyone his first couple of seasons...and lost big.  By the time the league slate rolled around I always felt the team was mentally crushed.

 

I mean Trilli wasn't a good coach either, but I do think the OOC schedules really shattered those teams.

Edited 4 hours ago by CMJ

[DeepGreen]

BTW, thank goodness my memory of Vic Trilli has vanished, but where did he coach prior to his stint at UNT?

[Censored by Laurie]

3 minutes ago, CMJ said:

I d think we could stand to add some difficulty, but there's a fine line though, because you also don't want a Vic Trilli OOC slate.  We played anyone and everyone his first couple of seasons...and lost big.  By the time the league slate rolled around I always felt the team was mentally crushed.

 

I mean Trilli wasn't a good coach either, but I do think the OOC schedules really shattered those teams.

ya, we don't need to be loading up with away trips to SEC and Big 12 schools, but there are plenty of pier programs in a similar position to us...top say 50-150 NET...that we could be better rounding out a schedule with.

Mountain West (New Mexico, Utah State)
Missouri Valley (Drake, UNI)
Conference USA (Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee)
McNeese, if they stay at their level

every school listed is top 150 NET with either regional or historical ties to our program. add in a 3 game tourney with an SEC/Big 12 school and a couple tune-up games in there, maybe against a lower-tier Texas school like SFA or Sam Houston, and you have a perfectly fine schedule

[CMJ]

17 minutes ago, DeepGreen said:

BTW, thank goodness my memory of Vic Trilli has vanished, but where did he coach prior to his stint at UNT?

He was an assistant at Texas prior to coming to NT.

[GMG_Dallas]

52 minutes ago, Censored by Laurie said:

ya, we don't need to be loading up with away trips to SEC and Big 12 schools, but there are plenty of pier programs in a similar position to us...top say 50-150 NET...that we could be better rounding out a schedule with.

Mountain West (New Mexico, Utah State)
Missouri Valley (Drake, UNI)
Conference USA (Western Kentucky, Middle Tennessee)
McNeese, if they stay at their level

every school listed is top 150 NET with either regional or historical ties to our program. add in a 3 game tourney with an SEC/Big 12 school and a couple tune-up games in there, maybe against a lower-tier Texas school like SFA or Sam Houston, and you have a perfectly fine schedule

I believe we can beat just about any bottom half Big 12, Big 10, Big East, and ACC school this year. This year's SEC seems different but I still think we stand a chance against a few of them... those bottom half of those conferences are the schools I'm asking to schedule though. Can you really know who will be good on any given year? No but you can kind of guess based on recent trends. The beauty of the portal is you see who a program is getting every season. It's not like before where you might have to guess how existing players progress or how freshmen do.

The bottom halves of those conferences have plenty of schools in your NET 50-150 range plus they come with some conference appeal.

[greenminer]

7 hours ago, GMG_Dallas said:

I don't believe this for one second. This stuff is about Quad 1 and Quad 2 games. That's what resumes boil down to. It doesn't matter what the school is named. Alabama hosted McNeese State this year who's NET is about what ours is and made the tournament last year.

How far in advance do they make these schedules? McNeese at one point was a Q1 NET, one or two seasons ago.

I wonder if being in the 40-50 range of NET is tough because we're a team pretty darn capable of beating these them, but not Q1 so it's not worth it to them?

Just throwing that out there.  I'm all for getting more opportunities to beat Q1 teams.  We need it!

Edited 1 hour ago by greenminer

[GMG_Dallas]

24 minutes ago, greenminer said:

How far in advance do they make these schedules? McNeese at one point was a Q1 NET, one or two seasons ago.

I wonder if being in the 40-50 range of NET is tough because we're a team pretty darn capable of beating these them, but not Q1 so it's not worth it to them?

Just throwing that out there.  I'm all for getting more opportunities to beat Q1 teams.  We need it!

They're pretty much done on a yearly basis with the exception of some home-home agreements. From what I've seen, even the mid-season tournaments are scheduled only about a year in advance.

I see what you're saying about the road contests not being Quad 1 for the home team. Enter the neutral site game. Like with Mississippi State last year, schedule a neutral site close-ish to the opponent so it's likely to still be a Quad 1 game for them as long as we finish in the top 50 which we have been pretty consistently for the past few years now.

There's quite a few mid-majors with good schedules that we should be mirroring. For example, Dayton played Northwestern, North Carolina, Iowa State, Connecticut, Marquette, UNVL, and Cincinnati. Santa Clara played Arizona State, Nevada, Stanford, TCU, Washington, McNeese, and Bradley. New Mexico played UCLA, St John's, Arizona State, USC, and VCU. It's hard for me to believe we can't schedule like them because schools are "afraid" of us.

[MCMLXXX]

23 minutes ago, GMG_Dallas said:

They're pretty much done on a yearly basis with the exception of some home-home agreements.

Next year we play at Oregon State based on a home-home agreement. We need more of these with PAC12 and MWC schools. That game should be an opportunity for a quad one win next year.