Re: Coaching Carousel & Hot Seat 2018
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:02 pm
Bill Marsh wrote:stever20 wrote:Saw Hurley did in fact leave for UConn.
If nothing else, this totally shows where the A10 is in relation now to the AAC. To have your best coach leave for the AAC is devastating.
The AAC if UConn and Memphis get back to their normal becomes a whole lot more difficult to ignore. Already had 3 top 6 seed year this year.
Stever, the problem at UConn is its devastating drop in attendance in recent years, which is why they were willing to go to the max to get Hurley. If he’s successful, his contract will pay for itself.
Membership in the AAC hurts UConn attendance for a number of reasons, regardless of how the league is rated. So, objective #1 For both Hurley and their AD Benedict has to be to improve attendance. More wins will help a lot but they also need to bolster the schedule with schools that are of more interest to their fan base.
My proposal is that UConn use all of their available OOC games to schedule P6 Northeast teams from the Big East, ACC, and Big Ten. They should accept the fact that the bottom half of the AAC is a group of schools that teams normally schedule in November/December to warm up against. They should therefore lobby the AAC to schedule some conference games in December. In my proposal, they would play high level tournament games in November and go from there with the P6 games, saving some feature games with their old BE rivals for January/February.
This is the old “play any team, any time, any place” Gonzaga attitude with which a team schedules more like an independent than one whose feature games are in conference. Here are the 9 games I propose that they schedule OOC every year:
Boston College
Providence
Syracuse
St. John’s
Seton Hall
Rutgers
Villanova
Maryland
Georgetown
A side benefit would be building relationships with ACC and B1G schools who might eventually help them in their efforts to gain membership in one of these leagues. In this effort, they might prefer to schedule Pitt or Penn State instead of Seton Hall.
Your thoughts?
Few things-
1- with the move to 12 teams/18 games, UConn avoided playing 4 of the weaker teams a 2nd time. 10 of the 18 conference games were tier 1 or 2. The league had only 3 sub 150 teams. Teams regularly schedule more than that number of bad teams.
2- they are going to want to make the tourney. Doing a schedule with 9 P6 teams, plus an exempt tournament, plus the AAC(a top 7 conference) would be an impossible schedule. The AAC is MUCH tougher than the WCC ever has been or ever will be. MUCH deeper.
3- they still will need home games. They had this year 6 games vs poor teams OOC. Those games pay the bills. That's not going to change much.
4- winning will cure a lot of ails. The AAC showed this year they can with a good OOC along with good conference play- get a top 2 seed. That would get folks excited more than anything else. They've gotten series with Nova and Georgetown already- and would expect more and more of those.