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Committee satisfaction guaranteed?

By Gary Brown
NCAA.org

“The committee is looking at what you did with your schedule on the parts with which you have some control. You can’t control the RPI of your conference, but you do have 10 to 12 games a year over which you have control. If you go out and play people, you get credit for that. If you don’t challenge yourself, then you don’t get credit.”

That’s former Division I Men’s Basketball Committee chair Bob Bowlsby on what the committee likes to see when it reviews teams’ resumes in March. As such, it places a premium on scheduling tough opponents on the road since wins in those situations are beacons for the 10-member selection panel. Of course, “wins” is the operative word in that directive.

“What the selection committee is saying is that you have to go win those games, not just play them,” said Utah State coach Stew Morrill, who has made such a habit of winning at home that few power teams want to test the trek to the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum in Logan. “Fans feel the same way. They don’t want me just to go play the Pac-10 and Big 12 schools; they want me to go beat them.

“My response is always the same: I’m willing to go play those guys, fully realizing that at their place I’m up against it, but they have to be willing to come here and be up against it at least a little bit for it to be fair. So the committee is saying that we all need to play better schedules, but they don’t deal with the frustration that I deal with of trying to improve the strength of schedule.”

Bowlsby, now the AD at Stanford after a long stay in the same position at Iowa, said the committee feels Morrill’s pain. Though the RPI is not weighted to reward simply playing on the road, Bowlsby said committee members notice when mid-majors play a power school close.

“Even in losing, those kinds of things are taken into consideration,” he said.

But too much losing isn’t a good thing. If mid-majors can’t get the more competitively equitable home-and-home, they often opt for guarantee games or two-for-one arrangements that can make their nonconference schedules tilted toward road games.

“I don’t want to go sell our program down the river and play teams that won’t come back,” Morrill said. “Let’s face it, if I go to a BCS conference team’s place, I’m probably going to get beat. So if I go play those people and they don’t come back, how does that help me?”

Former committee chair Tom O’Connor, the AD at George Mason, whose run to the Final Four in 2006 continues to pay dividends for the school’s basketball reputation, said it’s not the committee’s charge to dictate to any school, AD or coach whom they should schedule.

“On the other hand,” he said, “any committee member would like to see good basketball being played and teams winning meaningful games. So if you are playing a good schedule against quality competition and you’re winning games, that will get the committee’s attention.”

As for the difficulty for teams to schedule on a level playing court, O’Connor said he wishes coaches and ADs would “hang their guns at the door and have a more open conversation.”

“If I could change one sentence in the scheduling conversation, it’s that opening line when one coach says to the other, ‘Can you come here first?’ ” O’Connor said. “But that’s not reality. The reality is that in some cases, it’s business in the way some people schedule. It’s business when you have a large arena that has a capacity of 15,000 or 30,000 – it makes sense for those institutions to keep their teams home for those games.

“At the same time, it makes sense for other institutions to go on the road and get a big guarantee. Some schools base their budgets on those kinds of games. But a school like George Mason, which has had a good amount of success over the years, teams shy away from playing on our home court.”

So yes, what the committee is asking for is difficult to do, Bowlsby said. “But I think you need to take a thoughtful approach to it as an institution and as a conference.”