NCAA Basketball: Modern-day scheduling is a puzzling art for coaches

Scheduling is always a rocky road with multiple hurdles to get over

The biggest problem we as fans have when it comes to scheduling, especially for those teams not in a power conference is that they have a really hard time scheduling the teams we, and by extension, the selection committee would like them to play in the non-conference portion of the season. After talking with coaches, I think they would agree with fans that the inability to get teams to play them is their biggest frustration as well. The other biggest roadblock for them is more of a logistical one and that is being able to find dates and arenas that work for all parties involved.

For coaches at the non-power level, getting teams to play them is the first and most difficult hurdle to get over.

One coach I spoke to doesn’t believe in roadblocks or hurdles of any kind, Corey Gipson who takes over at Austin Peay this season says, “When it comes to level, the level is the mindset. I don’t believe in low-major, mid-major, high-major, I don’t believe in that. Whatever your mindset is, that’s what you’re going to become.”

Tod Kowalczyk has been a head coach since 2002 and has been at Toledo since 2010 while averaging nearly 25 wins per season over the last three years. When I talked to him he had some strong feelings about the ability of teams at his level to schedule.

"“The disadvantage is growing, when the NCAA decided to go to the NET rankings, that really hurt mid-majors. We don’t have the opportunity to get quad 1 wins and they talk about those quads all the time.” He went as far as to say, “I think it would be healthy for college basketball and healthy for mid-majors especially if we went back to the RPI system.”"

If it is that difficult for a coach with that much Division I experience, imagine what it might be like for a program brand new to this level, and a program that wins 18 games in its first season and announces its presence by defeating Marshall in their first game.

That’s what happened to Grant Leonard and Queens University and I had the opportunity to talk to him about the difficulties he has faced in trying to build a schedule for his team. He says, “At the Division II level people wanted to play at Queens, it was an experience for them, and now trying to get people to come to Queens in Division I is really difficult. They know we are going to be really hard to play and we’ve won 80-plus percent of our games here, so they are trying to avoid playing us in Queens.”

It was interesting for me to hear that coaches share some of the same struggles when it comes to scheduling as fans do, but also hear more insight into the logistical side of it which is something we as fans don’t often think about.