Non-conference schedule released

[dcdore]

Silence here.

Thud!

[AuricGoldfinger]

A very soft non-conference schedule. Only one true road game (at Memphis), against the only team that will probably be ranked at the time VU plays them.

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[mathguy]

I'm OK with this. We *should* start 4-0. NC St, and BYU/ASU may not be world beaters but will be good tests for us. BC should be a win, and I know they aren't what they used to be, but they're still an ACC team. Memphis will be a test ... after we've had 10 games to figure out who we are, and after exam week.

Now let's just avoid bad losses, which apparently mean more than good wins anyway...

[UltimateVUFan]

VU had the 6th most difficult non-conference SOS among SEC teams last season. Didn’t do much for them at the end of the year. A “soft” tune-up schedule isn’t the worst thing, especially if they still perform similarly in the conference slate.

[commadore]

We have a lot of new pieces to get acclimated to Stac's system. It is nice to see a schedule that will allow the team to gel.

[Jason94]

Seems pretty simple like last season. There will be 4 games that will be challenging - NCSU, ASU/BYU, Tx Tech, and at Memphis. We actually need to win a couple of those games (last season we went 0-fer in our challenging games of NCSU, St. Mary's Memphis and VCU, which was as big of an issue as us losing games to Southern Miss and Grambling at home. We cannot have a disaster non-conference season and think we will be able to make it up in conference.

Who we scheduled last season wasn't so much the problem as was how we performed. CJS has to figure out how to get the players to get off to a faster start and have a set rotation much earlier in the season. I think that will be the case with Manjon, Lawrence, Taylor and Smith likely getting most of the starts at 1-4. Our home non-conference schedule is very weak and we should finish undefeated - any losses will be seen as bad losses by the committee. The best team on paper will either be San Francisco or BC, and a tournament team will beat both those teams at home. Any other home loss would be a quad 3 or 4 loss. The 4 road/neutral games should all be quad 1 opportunities, and we need to get at least one, but this team should be able to get two of them if they are a tournament level team. Only Memphis is a likely tournament team next on paper.

We should enter conference with a 10-3 record at worst, I would think a 11-2 record is very reasonable and 12-1 if we get a little luck. Hopefully the team and CJS understands that these games will count the same as the conference games and don't use them to tinker or experiment. CJS can mess around with lineups up 30 with less than 10 minutes in the 2nd half, but until then he needs to make sure we have the game under control.

The committee has been very clear about what they are looking for - no excuses this year.

[mathguy]

We have a lot of new pieces to get acclimated to Stac's system. It is nice to see a schedule that will allow the team to gel.

Agreed.

[underdog74]

Of course the brainpower behind the NCAA selection committee will communicate how important a challenging OOC schedule is this year about midway through the season. The metrics seem to change every year.

[Jason94]

Of course the brainpower behind the NCAA selection committee will communicate how important a challenging OOC schedule is this year about midway through the season. The metrics seem to change every year.

There have been multiple explainers that note that date of the game was removed from consideration. Here is one from 2019:

https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-me ... -tool-help

The committee did consider using the game date, an uncapped scoring margin, distance traveled and days of rest before a game but decided against using these in the equation.

This is not a secret and has been something the committee has talked about for a while now. The metrics may seem to change every year, but the idea of the NET and elimination of when games were played as a factor is not new. There are multiple articles out there about the idea that the conference record is not a factor in selection.