You are correct. NCAA does not care about Q1 losses. Anyone paying attention to the selection since they switched to the quad system knows going 2-4 through that tough stretch will leave us in much better shape than going 6-0 against weak competition. Plus, as other have stated, fewer opportunities for bad losses.
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I skipped ahead on this thread so maybe my take is irrelevant (as usual) or redundant but duke and unc fans probably don’t complain about playing other blue bloods in the OOC schedule. Are we or are we not big boys?
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IMO, not next year. Hope I’m wrong
I like this take a lot. Trevor Keels went off in MSG last November on a big stage vs Kentucky
This team this coming season, we are big boys
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You aren’t a big boy if it depends on the year.
We didn’t miss the tourney last year because we lost to Houston. We missed it because we lost to navy and jmu.
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I guess I look at the Q differently. Duke and UNC are always big boys. But Duke and UNC don’t always make the tourney. They both recently missed it. Then, at the margins, things like scheduling CAN (but not necessarily will) matter.
** however, want to be clear here — other than Houston, these games are out of our hands. So it’s not like uva did something wrong. I’m just trying to answer the question : is the schedule favorable? I only part ways with those who eliminate “maybe not” as a possibility.
*** and our “big boy” status is more tenuous than Duke and UNC.
We’re going to kick Michigan’s ass….
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WRT scheduling: I could very well be wrong, but…
Prior to the ACC Tournament, Virginia typically plays 30 games in a normal year.
The conference schedule now consists of 20 games, leaving ten OOC games to be scheduled.
The ACC schedules the ACC-B1G match-up as well as any early season OOC tournaments. This can be three to four of the OOC games. That leaves six or seven games which are at Virginia’s discretion.
In the past, Coach Bennett has typically scheduled two home-and-home series with P6 schools each year, and staggered them so that the first game with one opponent is in the same year as the second game with the other. It is my understanding that these games are scheduled well in advance. Fortunes can change before they’re played.
This leaves four or five games to schedule. In that five game block, Coach Bennett, as most P6 coaches seem to do, schedules at least one smaller school who needs the payday. (I have been especially pleased when UVa plays a HBC school.) Making ends meet at these smaller schools cannot be that easy.
That leaves anywhere from two to four games left which have typically gone to state or regional opponents. In a season when Virginia is expected to be really strong, a made-for-television contest might be arranged by one of the networks.
So, much of the strength of Virginia’s OOC schedule is unpredictable. It is was it is even if it is somewhat random. I am unsure that there is anything which can be done about it from Charlottesville.
(I cannot remember if a school playing in an eight team early season tournament gets to add another game to its schedule, or not. If so, adjust the math yourselves!)
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Whether Virginia is a “big boy” or not, it should certainly aspire to be one, and to do that, it must play other “big boys” or those also aspiring to be the same! You don’t become a “big boy” by avoiding those who already are!
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Thanks for this analysis. One part of this is news to me. Does the conference really schedule the pre season tournaments for us? And do we not have any discretion about whether to accept the invitation to play in those tournaments?
I don’t believe this is correct.
They do with ACC/BIG10 Challenge but pretty sure that is not the case for pre season tournaments.
I could be wrong.
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Those early season tournaments are scheduled by league offices, event organizers, and TV networks. Schools can ultimately decline to participate in an individual event. UVA probably won’t go back to Maui under Tony, for example, as he thinks it’s too disruptive of a trip. Or opt out of participating in one altogether like Kentucky has done recently. But schools do not schedule these tournaments. Their conferences allocate them into slots.
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If they have veto power then they basically do schedule them but I get it.
It’s basically the same process as bowl games in football. If you consider schools as scheduling those themselves then, yes, you could say schools schedule their own tournaments. But really it’s more of a ‘yes we’d like to play in a tournament this year’ and then the ACC/ESPN figure out which one we are going to go to.
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Me and Ric agree
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Thanks. I really never knew how any of this was handled, but I recall reading of us “accepting” the invitation to the Battle for Atlantis a couple of years back.
Re your point about TB not wanting to go to Maui, how much input do schools have in advance of the scheduling? Can Tony issue a preemptive veto on Maui? Will the conference give that any weight?
The schools have involvement in the process. Don’t know how formal or informal it is. The contracts are just with the conferences. So rather than UVA agreeing to a one year deal when we went to Atlantis, for example, we were the ACC’s chosen representative on a long term agreement. But I don’t believe it’s a dictatorial process or anything and they do their best to try to accommodate the wishes of each school.
For an event like Maui, where most fan bases are clamoring to go and the league only has an open slot 2 of every 4 years (Duke and UNC take the other 2), it probably makes things easier to have a couple of coaches say they aren’t interested. Why try to force someone to go when there are 7 (or however many) other coaches dying to go?
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Thanks. That makes sense.
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I think it might be added here that the arrangement between the ACC, ESPN, and tournament coordinators works out to the advantage of all the schools in the conference. Perhaps those predicted in preseason to be in the Top 25 don’t need that help, but the arrangement does insure that everyone gets an invitation to a tournament regardless of their ranking, and that the bottom rungs of the conference get invitations to events they might not have wrangled by themselves otherwise. It might be remembered that in Coach Bennett’s first season, Virginia played in the Moon Palace Resort (who knew? was that its name?) Tournament with Kentucky, Stanford, and Cleveland State. I have no idea if the staff could have arranged this in just eight months, but I’m sure the process was made easier having the conference involved.
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Pretty sure the exempt events count as one game regardless of how many games are actually played.
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