2007-2008 Preview

2007-2008 BIG EAST PREVIEW: CONFERENCE SCHEDULE ANALYSIS

July 21, 2007

Last Friday afternoon the Big East conference revved up basketball talk for the 2007-2008 season conference season with the release of the Expanded 18-Game Conference Schedule Match-ups (BigEast.org).  As promised, the conference made the jump from 16 conference games to 18, meaning each school plays the other 15 league members at least once and still has three teams that they face in a home and home series.

The Big East signed a lucrative deal with ESPN that begins this coming season. It calls for every conference game to be carried by the network’s family of channels, an unprecedented step by the cable giant for college basketball.  In order to satisfy calls to eliminate the inequality of their conference schedule, the Big East made the move for each team to play each other at least once, but in order to satisfy the TV networks and give them the games they want to see, the conference retained their practice of having each team play three ‘mirror’ opponents in a home and home series.  Those opponents were released, along with home and road match-ups, by the league on Friday.

 

Tim Welsh told the Providence Journal that television contractual obligations is certainly the most important factor when the Big East made their scheduling decision, “Most of the coaches feel that 18 (games) is a television-driven item,” he said. “With the financial pressures in today’s game, TV drives the market and the package we have in the long run will help the whole league. It’s a great deal we have with ESPN. The added exposure is great for everyone.”

While Big East coaches were split on the expanded schedule, which leaves room for a maximum of 13 non-conference games, they all agreed on a balanced slate.
“Everybody needs to play everybody once,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said in a Pittsburgh Tribune-review article.

One thing that I have noticed when analyzing the schedule is that the projected preseason strength of schedules have evened out greatly.  The last two years their was a noticeable drop among the top half and the bottom half of the league.  Most of that was determined by who teams did not play, not so much who they played twice.  This year, with everyone playing everyone at least once, the schedules have been smoothed out much more noticeably, a fact not lost on the conference’s coaches.
 
 ”I’m tremendously excited about it,” Marquette coach Tom Crean told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “We’ve got so many high-level opponents coming to the Bradley Center. I thought the schedule makers did a great job of keeping it very fair and balanced. TV is going to participate in matchups, and I think we’re right near the front of the table on that.”

“You never know, really, but it looks to be distributed very fairly,” said Welsh in the Providene Journal article. “You’re playing good teams every night, but it’s way too early to tell who is good and who isn’t. I know there are no easy games, no easy road trips, but it is great for our fans with Georgetown, Louisville and Connecticut coming in.”

One of the more constant objectors to the conference schedule the last couple seasons has been Louisville’s Rick Pitino, and once again, he expressed some dissatisfaction in how the schedule is created, “This is as competitive a league schedule as I’ve seen in the Big East,” Pitino said in statement. “I’m not overjoyed with the selection process for the repeat games, but this league schedule will certainly be entertaining for our fans and competitive for our players.”

Making the schedule is never an easy process in the Big East which has to satisfy TV demands for high-profile matchups, juggle availability for the league’s many multi-purpose arenas and maintain competitive balance among the 16 teams.  This means the person with the hardest job in the Big East Conference might be Tom Odjakjian who is in charge of putting together the conference’s schedule.  Odjakjian said the conference tried to match heavyweight teams for TV tilts but wanted to make sure those at the top weren’t unfairly burdened. 

“There is some guesswork involved,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “There is a certain amount of security about which teams should be pretty good, but it’s an inexact science for sure.” 

The mirror opponents will change yearly. Odjakjian said competitive balance is more important than existing rivalries, which is why games such as Louisville-Cincinnati or Pittsburgh-West Virginia won’t be made permanent home-and-home series. 

“I don’t think any rivalry is guaranteed every year,” he said. “If playing it changes the balance of fairness, we’ll err on the side of fairness every time.”
“It’s good that each team is playing every other team,” Big East commissioner Michael Tranghese said. “It makes the conference schedule more balanced, and we are still able to make some very attractive and intriguing matchups a second time.”
The Providence Journal shined more light on the scheduling process in an article earlier this week when they let readers know that the Big East’s coaches took part in a straw poll in June that ranked the teams heading into the 2007-08 season. The poll helped the league determine the crossover foes, among other scheduling dynamics. From reviewing the schedules, it is pretty safe to assume that Georgetown and Louisville came out on top of that poll with Marquette and Syracuse following them.  Syracuse is an interesting team because they lose as much as anyone in the conference in terms of production and experience, from a team that went to the NIT.  However, with returning players such as Paul Harris and Eric Devendorf as well an incoming freshman class regarded among the top three in the country that includes McDonald’s All-Americans Jonny Flynn and Dante Green, there is a strong demand for the Orange on television.

The middle of the pack seems to be led by Villanova and Pittsburgh according to the schedule makers with Connecticut, Providence, West Virginia and Notre Dame amongst the teams in the muck.  Seton Hall, Rutgers and South Florida each get to play the other two times, which will likely help one of those teams emerge from the bottom tier to fight with DePaul, Cincinnati and St. John’s for the last spots at the Big East Tournament in Madison Square Garden.

Each year we have posted a pre-season schedule analysis where we apply a point formula to each team’s home and road match-ups to rank the schedules.  Each post-season, we take a look back at how close we came in our analysis.  Here are the links to our previous articles the last two seasons:
 <a href=http://bigeastbasketball.blogspot.com/2005/07/big-east-schedule-analysis.html>2005-2006 Big East Schedule Analysis</a>
<a href=http://bigeastbasketball.blogspot.com/2006/03/final-big-east-conference-rpi-ratings.html>2005-2006 Final Conference RPI Ratings & Schedule Analysis</a>
<a href=http://bigeastbasketball.blogspot.com/2006/09/2006-2007-big-east-preview-conference.html>2006-2007 Big East Schedule Analysis</a>.
<a href=http://bigeastbasketball.blogspot.com/2007/03/big-east-conference-rpi-sos-ratings_05.html>2006-2007 Final Big East Conference RPI Ratings & Schedule Analysis</a>

So, let’s take a look now at how the 2007-2008 Big East conference schedules rank, starting with the toughest and ending with the easiest:

1) Villanova
2) DePaul
3) St. John’s
4) Rutgers
5) Cincinnati
6) Notre Dame
7) West Virginia
Louisville
9) Syracuse
10) Marquette
11) South Florida
12) Georgetown
13) Providence
14) Pittsburgh
15) Connecticut
16) Seton Hall

These schedules are so tightly packed that many of the top teams earned easier schedules than the teams projected in the lower-half of the league for the main reason that the top teams do not play themselves.  For instance, a game against Georgetown or Louisville grades out as the toughest a team can face, whereas Villanova has to face both on the road, Georgetown and Louisville face each other, home and away, softening it just a bit.  Same factor hits Rutgers in an opposite manner as a home game with Rutgers or USF grades out (on paper) as the easiest match-up in the league, so whereas nine teams have a home date with Rutgers, the Scarlet Knights do not have that luxury for their schedule

Villanova and Pitt are seen in the same tier, but they are on opposite ends of the schedule strength spectrum for the sole reason that the Wildcats go on the road to face Louisville and Georgetown while Pittsburgh plays both of them in the Peterson Events Center.  Those small factors turn one team’s schedule into the toughest and the other team’s to one of the ‘easiest’.  However, based on how unbalanced they schedules were in the past, they grade out, top to bottom, VERY similar this year.

So, in a nutshell, the Big East has done a very good job in scheduling this year.  Although we say on paper it looks like Seton Hall has the easiest schedule and Villanova the most difficult,  their schedules are not that different as they each have six home dates the same and five road dates the same.  The Pirates face Cincinnati, Louisville and Rutgers at home while ‘Nova takes on Pitt, WVU and host SHU.  On the road, SHU travels to Nova as well as Marquette, USF and WVU while the Jay Wright’s squad takes on Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville and Syracuse away from home.  That is the difference from a top schedule and a bottom schedule this year, not much!

Kudos to the Big East conference.  They have definitely put together a schedule that should not have anyone calling it unjustly tough or easy towards anyone this season.

Of course, now all they have to do is play this brutal schedule!  I am glad I will be on my sofa watching it and not pulling my hair out trying to prepare night in and night out for these games.  It is enough to put a grey hair or two even on Jay Wright’s head!