2014-2015 Early Season tournaments: Great link

[Pony81]

I was at the South Carolina Upstate game with 1000 of my closest friends....
Expected an SMU blowout and we got beat rather easily. I was surprised how poor and flat we looked. At that point the light came on that the players didn't want to play for Doh.

[OhioBrownFan]

Two things...

1) Wichita St is in everyone's Early Top 10 for next year.

2) Top 20 schools from big confs don't need or want to play SMU, because their conference provides them with a strong enough schedule and ample chances to get resume building wins.

So they don't need a strong OOC but we do? Ok.

For one, they have a strong in conference schedule, something the AAC doesn't provide. It provides the quality at top, not the quality at the bottom. The bottom half is really, really bad and that hurts until it is fixed, something I don't know if that will ever happen (I have a hard time seeing UCF, East Carolina, or USF being quality bball programs year-in, year-out).

#2, I can't speak for all schools, but most do have a strong OOC. And they also play 2-3 top teams in tournaments or invitationals of some sort.

Take Kentucky, they play UNC and Louisville every year guaranteed, they used to play Indiana home and home every year as well. They also play in the Champions Classic guaranteeing either 1) MSU, 2) Duke, or 3) Kansas. That's more than enough quality. On top of all that, they just added another tourney between UCLA, UK, Ohio State and UNC. The Big 10/ACC have the challenge, so there's at least one game. Almost every top B10 and ACC team is in some sort of OOC tourney/invitational so there is the second OOC quality game. Then they usually have other games like MSU playing Texas or Ohio State playing Marquette or Michigan playing Zona. On top of that, these schools do an exceptional job of scheduling the mid-tier games, the ND States, Wyomings, Delawares, ect. That's the key, not just the top tier, but also the bottom tier. It'd be hard to find teams that weren't on the bubble with exceptionally weak OOC schedules from the big conferences.

That's my two cents on the subject.

As far as SMU, I'm confident the OOC schedule will be much better this year with teams in the RPI 51-150 range. Something it lacked badly last year.

[MFFL02]

What are we thinking? Didn't we learn from this season, we need to schedule more tough games...especially with Louisville leaving our conference.

Why aren't we playing Wichita St on a neutral site like Memphis is doing? Why does Memphis see the light but we don't?

How do you know that we are not trying? LB has said that he tried to schedule some tougher teams and they would not schedule us.

He's said that no top Texas will come to moody and that he's been trying to schedule Kentucky. We were suppossed to play Kentucky last year, but it didn't work out.

This is why I would ignore the big schools then and just agree to home and homes with a ton of mid-majors who are consistently good (Wichita St, Gonzaga, VCU, etc.).

[SoCal_Pony]

No surprise about our dog crap at the bottom of the conference, this was the main reason the BE dropped us.

Would so love to see us in the ACC. Moody would be the hottest ticket in town, period.