Good info and all makes sense. I'm curious just how much the admin is requiring each season to produce in away game revenue. It's pretty clear the issue is as simple as we need X amount of away games to produce revenue and its difficult in our position to fill the limited home slots with teams willing to play us at a price we can afford to pay. Another issue not talked about is we probably could buy games with SWAC-type teams, but they are NET rating killers, meanwhile non-D1 games don't count toward your NET rating at all. While we can win games at home vs. Prairie View/Texas Southern types and they'd maybe agree to play us at an affordable amount, if they are terrible it could really hurt our NET rating (that said, TSU has actually been pretty good the last few years, we may just be scared to play them...). Some of those SWAC teams play 0 non-conference home games. Some don't have their home opener till their first conference home games as late as January.
The SBC is about to make a push to make basketball more competitive. Football has been trending up, baseball is about to be really good, but basketball has been relatively poor in this conference and has shown no signs of improving. Scheduling is a big reason as every school in the league is facing these same issues as us. If the league is limiting non-D1 games to 2 this year that's a step in the right direction. It may hurt teams' ability to produce the revenue they want or limit the amount of non-conference home games but the league has to do something to improve the basketball product and that's a really good start. The massive amount of non-D1 games have been a real problem for the league for years as teams pad their W/L record for cheap at the expense of playing non-conference schedules that make it almost impossible for the league to have a good NET rating without getting multiple upsets of revenue games on the road, which the league rarely is able to do.
Another reason for the MTEs is it allows you to play more games. This is off the top of my head, but I think team's are allowed 29 game schedules, but MTE's count as one game. So if you play a 3-game MTE you can play a 31 game schedule, which is what most schools do. So it has limited effect on the schedule as a whole cause those 3 games functionally just count as 1 from a scheduling perspective. So if we decided not to play in an MTE one year it wouldn't change anything, other than we'd play less games total, but we'd still struggle to get attractive home games to offset the revenue road games.
It's a tough situation, but hopefully DC can find a way to generate revenue, win games, and give us fans exciting games as well. It'd be nice to not have to sacrifice one of those 3 to accomplish the other 2, which is what's going on.
The SBC is about to make a push to make basketball more competitive. Football has been trending up, baseball is about to be really good, but basketball has been relatively poor in this conference and has shown no signs of improving. Scheduling is a big reason as every school in the league is facing these same issues as us. If the league is limiting non-D1 games to 2 this year that's a step in the right direction. It may hurt teams' ability to produce the revenue they want or limit the amount of non-conference home games but the league has to do something to improve the basketball product and that's a really good start. The massive amount of non-D1 games have been a real problem for the league for years as teams pad their W/L record for cheap at the expense of playing non-conference schedules that make it almost impossible for the league to have a good NET rating without getting multiple upsets of revenue games on the road, which the league rarely is able to do.
Another reason for the MTEs is it allows you to play more games. This is off the top of my head, but I think team's are allowed 29 game schedules, but MTE's count as one game. So if you play a 3-game MTE you can play a 31 game schedule, which is what most schools do. So it has limited effect on the schedule as a whole cause those 3 games functionally just count as 1 from a scheduling perspective. So if we decided not to play in an MTE one year it wouldn't change anything, other than we'd play less games total, but we'd still struggle to get attractive home games to offset the revenue road games.
It's a tough situation, but hopefully DC can find a way to generate revenue, win games, and give us fans exciting games as well. It'd be nice to not have to sacrifice one of those 3 to accomplish the other 2, which is what's going on.
