PonyFans.com

If I am reading this schedules correctly saying that Tulsa only plays Cincinnati 1 time. I thought all the schools played each other twice?

http://www.tulsahurricane.com/sports/m- ... sched.html

No. We only play Tulane and one other school once as well.

ECU once also for us, and UCF once for Tulsa also. If I recall, Coach Brown asked that we always play Memphis and I believe UConn twice, and maybe Temple.

Okay thanks.

The American set it up so the "good" teams only had to play the "bad" teams once to help out the RPIs of the "good" teams.

Nobody had a clue Tulsa would be good obviously.

4 Junior Starters returning from NCAA Tournament team-I thought they would be good like they were at end of last year. Early losses were surprising though

You would think the team would know they need to take it up a notch starting right now as well.

Re: Why does Tulsa only play Cincinnati 1 time?

Because life ain't fair and we are SMU.

Let's win out…..all the way out!

It would actually be worse if we only played Tulsa once.

Now we have a chance to take 2 from them head to head.

Glad we don't get ECU twice.

I do hope that we always have a game in NOLA though - hopefully on a weekend (do we get Tulane H and H next year?)

As others have mentioned, it is a good thing for us to play the better teams in our conference twice and the bad teams only once. It only looks like a "problem" this year because we weren't able to take care of business against Cincinnati.

some of you kids must be using "New Math"-its only good if we make the Tournament and I'm not confident that the AAC gets more than its Champion and Tournament Champion in. Every single AAC team was slighted last year by the Committee-and the AAC was much stronger last year. I think its very likely every AAC team is slighted this year too.

Stallion wrote:some of you kids must be using "New Math"-its only good if we make the Tournament and I'm not confident that the AAC gets more than its Champion and Tournament Champion in. Every single AAC team was slighted last year by the Committee-and the AAC was much stronger last year. I think its very likely every AAC team is slighted this year too.

It's also good in the sense that it gives us more control of our destiny in conference. By your argument, the schedule doesn't even really matter; only the conference tournament. I'm not saying that's crazy either; that's the situation in a lot of non-P5 conferences. I'll amend my position to say it is better to play the good teams twice and the bad teams once if you're hoping for an "at large" bid or want a top seed in the conference tournament, but schedule is basically irrelevant if we're looking at a one bid league. (I guess a weak conference schedule might help us grab that automatic NIT bid?)

Stallion wrote:some of you kids must be using "New Math"-its only good if we make the Tournament and I'm not confident that the AAC gets more than its Champion and Tournament Champion in. Every single AAC team was slighted last year by the Committee-and the AAC was much stronger last year. I think its very likely every AAC team is slighted this year too.

For those of you who have looked at the selection com - again - no AAC representation this year. At least we don't have an ACC chair (Utah State guy chairing), but Stallion could be right on this - the entire AAC could get shafted once again. Need to Win Games...Finish Strong.

We all know the AAC set the schedule to have the best teams play each other twice, and I started wondering how they might have gone about it. I put together this table which shows the average rank of the teams a team only plays once. It is ordered based on the preseason poll with one exception. The preseason poll had UConn 1 and SMU 2. However, at the time the schedules were made Mudiay was still on the way so I moved SMU up to number 1 and it ended up being a better fit.

For example, SMU plays ECU and Tulane once. They are ranked 10 and 11 so the average rank of the teams we play once is 10.5.

Note that the values decline as you move down (until the bottom, which I will discuss below). This is what you would expect, with the best teams only playing the worst teams once and obviously that means the worst teams only play the best teams once.

I think one reason they did not get a better fit is that for some reason they had ECU and Tulane only play each other once even though they were projected as the worst teams.

Also, Tulsa was ranked #5 in the preseason poll. They were not commonly expected to be terrible. Having them only play the expected #4 team once probably did not seem like that big of a deal.

Avg rank
of teams
played once
1 SMU 10.5
2 Uconn 8.0
3 Memphis 7.0
4 Cincinnati 6.5
5 Tulsa 6.5
6 Temple 5.0
7 Houston 4.0
8 USF 3.5
9 UCF 3.5
10 East Carolina 6.0
11 Tulane 5.5

I love our end of season schedule. Take care of business, and we win the league. Beat these teams, and we'll keep a solid RPI. Much better than playing patsies - I understand UH has a bad record, but with our history with them, this game will be tough. If we get by them, we play all of the solid AAC teams other than Cinci to close out. We control our own destiny. Let's take them one at a time. Beat the Coogs.