NCAA Basketball: Cinderella stories start in the non-conference schedule

NCAA basketball loves a Cinderella team who comes out of nowhere in March. Those stories, however, start much earlier than the NCAA Tournament.

Over the past several seasons, the college basketball scene has been shocked on plenty of occasions by teams, mostly mid-majors, making deep runs into the NCAA Tournament despite being regarded as a long shot. These are the teams that just about everybody can rally around as the underdog. They rarely end up winning the entire championship, but some teams have come so incredibly close that they are still heralded as the biggest story of that season’s Big Dance.

In just the last ten seasons, we have seen Dayton make the Elite Eight as an 11 seed, Butler make the Final Four as a five seed and an eight seed in back-to-back seasons, VCU make the Final Four as an 11 seed, Wichita State make the Final Four as an eight seed, and Davidson make the Elite Eight as an 10 seed. And although each of these runs was a surprise to everybody, each team showed early in the season that they had the ability to knock off good teams, or at least compete.

For the mid-majors of the world, it is important to come away with at least one non-conference upset over a major conference opponent to give the players some experience in doing that. Each of the teams listed above did just that in their non-conference play, and it eventually led to them dominating their individual conferences and making an NCAA Tournament appearance. From there, they obviously had to play well, but the stage was not too big for them.

For the 2013-14 Dayton team that made the Elite Eight, they played the then nationally ranked #11 Gonzaga Bulldogs in the Maui Invitational, knocking them off before falling by just one point to the #18 Baylor Bears. These two match-ups could have proved vital later in the season when they took down back-to-back ranked opponents in the NCAA Tournament in #22 Ohio State and #14 Syracuse.

Butler’s second run to the National Championship as an eight seed was their most surprising. They had lost Gordon Hayward, a lottery talent, to the NBA from the previous season’s run to the title game and dropped from a five seed to an eight. Yet, they were able to pull it off. A lot of this team’s experience came from the tournament run of the season before, but Brad Stevens also challenged his team in the non-conference, playing several high profile opponents. Suffering losses in each, the Bulldogs took on Louisville, Duke, and Xavier all on the road during the non-conference schedule. They also took victories against Utah and Florida State.

Although not on the same scale as Dayton and Butler, VCU also attempted to challenge themselves in the non-conference schedule the year that they ran from the First Four to the Final Four in 2011, the same year we just talked about with Butler. The Rams played in the NIT Season Tip-Off at the beginning of the season, and were able to play against Wake Forest, Tennessee, and UCLA. During their regular season/conference tournament, they also played George Mason, who hovered around the top-25 all season.

For Stephen Curry’s Davidson team, the Wildcats challenged three different top-10 opponents in non-conference play. They took on North Carolina (#1 at the time), Duke (#7 at the time), and UCLA (#7 at the time), losing to all three. Yet, these were great learning moments for Curry and his teammates, as they eventually rose up to reach the Elite Eight after knocking off Gonzaga, Georgetown, and Wisconsin in the Big Dance.

Wichita State did not have an altogether challenging non-conference schedule during their Final Four season, but they were tested against challenging opponents in Iowa, VCU, and the top-25 ranked Creighton Bluejays three times (a conference foe at the time).

All in all, the point is that it is important for the top-level mid-major programs to test themselves in the non-conference if they want to make a surprise run in the NCAA Tournament. For starters, playing challenging opponents makes receiving an at-large bid to the Big Dance much easier. Aside from that, playing tough opponents has worked well for several of our most recent Cinderellas.

This does, however, come with a problem. For top-level mid-majors, it is almost impossible to schedule high-level competition. With the risk of a potential loss, these major programs avoid scheduling mid-majors and it is incredibly unlikely that one of these programs would travel to play a Wichita State (although now in the AAC) or a Davidson on the road.

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It is unlikely that anything is going to change, but battles between the powerhouses of the country and the best mid-majors would be awesome for fans to watch. It would create more competitive games in the early portion of the season as well as hopefully make each team more battle-tested for the Big Dance at the end of the season.