DudeAnon wrote:The problem with gaming the system is there are no guarantees that teams are going to behave as you expect. Also there are no guarantees that the committee is going to behave (SBU had an RPI of 30 last year and was still left out.) Expansion should only be done if there is a program that is consistently competitive at a high level and has a good brand. After that you let the chips lay where they may.
There are no guarantees, true. But there’s tons of data on how programs behave over time:
- Butler averaged 20 wins over a 19-year stretch, you know Butler’s good.
- The Big East has never suffered the level of disrespect the Bonnies suffered last season, where the BCS administrators on the committee think the A-10 is a JV league so Bonaventure’s marquee conference wins over Dayton and St. Joe’s were rendered meaningless. The A-10 hasn’t won a national championship since… La Salle in the 1950s before the league was formed (I think?). The perception of the A-10 as weak wouldn’t apply in the Big East. It is irrelevant.
And you’re applying “How everyone else handles expansion” to the Big East, when the Big East isn’t like everyone else for one simple reason:
Hall2012 wrote:What's more is that the Big East showed they didn't want to play that game in breaking off to begin with. The C7 schools had an opportunity to inflate their records by feasting on the likes of East Carolina, Navy, USF, and Tulane every year, but opted to break off because that's exactly what they didn't want to do. The whole point of breaking off was to form a strong basketball conference where everyone is competitive top to bottom, and we're almost there. There's no benefit to adding more deadwood to the bottom of the conference.
The old Big East added those schools that weren’t good in basketball because they were “needed” FOR FOOTBALL. The C7 split so they could make BASKETBALL DECISIONS. And this is a basketball decision.
We’re not talking about “deadwood” to the bottom of the league. We’re talking about strategic balance to the league, how to manage “the conference factor” to create “a strong basketball conference where everyone is competitive” with the REST OF THE COUNTRY, instead of “from top to bottom.”
Why is being competitive “top to bottom” important? Why does that make you a “Strong Conference?” Does it make you a “strong conference” from an “every game is hard”
All you’re doing is forcing Georgetown and Marquette to finish WORSE than they are capable of.
Bill Marsh wrote:Sounds good in theory. The problem is it's not true. The bigger sized conferences do NOT "routinely get 6-9 bids annually." They just don't.
Conferences with numbers will not get a lot of bids solely on the basis of numbers. (See SEC.) It's the big 12 and the Big East who have been securing bids for half their member or more. The 4 other football conferences have fallen below half their membership for the 5 years.
YES! This is the kind of data analysis you need to configure the best possible conference! But the one thing you’re omitting is the one thing that I KNOW YOU KNOW: The Big East is the best basketball-first conference in the country.
What on earth makes you think that if the Big East had 14 teams, you’d make your decisions like the SEC, which is a football-first conference? You’re not going to add a terrible Missouri basketball team because they’re good at football, are you? No! This is about “what’s best for the Big East, and WHY?”
The WHY is what’s important to me. I know I SOUND crazy, but the explanation and trying to illustrate the effect is data-driven.
Repeating conventional wisdom that “Adding good teams makes you better” really has no data-driven evidence because there’s no other conference that has eight good basketball teams and only two not so good teams and made a decision to expand based on basketball.