We need to start playing a couple ACC schools every year. It’s why Vandy got in as a 9 with 15 losses. And SC got in as a 7. We don’t have to play Duke or NC. Any team but BC. If we do that it will greatly help our resume for the future. Playing a Pac-12 school wouldn’t hurt either. The way I look at it any ACC school even in the bottom half of that league are all going to have great RPI’s & top 50 wins.
I think Arkansas played a fine nonconference schedule. Minnesota and Oklahoma State both ended up in the tournament. Arkansas just needs to win more big nonconference games.
We played Wake Forest last two years and Clemson two years before that. It is not about playing ACC schools. It is about playing any Power 5 schools and beating them. We played Texas, Oklahoma State and Minnesota from Poer 5 this year. What went wrong this year is that all those games ended up as road games. We did beat Texas, but as luck would have it, Texas was down this year.
Hopefully next year we will get 2 of those Power 5 matchups at home, where you have the best chance of winning.
Non conference schedule wasn’t what hurt our seeding. Mizzou and Miss State did.
Exactly.
Win those two and I honestly think we are a 6. It changes the entire perception of the team.
Getting routed by OSU hurt. Losing to them not so much. That is just my opinion on that last thing. I realize the size of the loss doesn’t effect RPI, but it sure affects perceptions.
You are all missing my point. The point is you don’t know how good an OSU will be or a Texas but in the ACC everyone is very well tested & playing teams like Miami, Clemson, VT etc better prepare you for the SEC. Playing Texas did nothing for us. And I don’t care how good The big 12 says they are they don’t compare to the ACC.
For all the talk of The Big 12 being so good they only got 6 teams in the field. The SEC for a bad conference got 5 in. We need to play “better” power 5 schools. You do that and u might not lose to the Mizzou’s or MSU’s of the league.
Playing tougher teams make you tougher in your own conference. Playing a Minnesota or a Houston is not what I call mentally preparing yourself down the line. And if you think Arkansas had a good non conference schedule think again. Go look at Alabama, Florida, Vandy, and UK. They all scheduled better out of conference than we did.
Out of all the SEC teams that got in the field we had the worst SOS.
Florida and UK schedules are better because they get TV games scheduled by networks that rest of SEC schools are not getting right now. UK also gets home and home series with schools such as UNC and Louisville because of their profile. We cannot get those home and home series right now. UNC will not come to Fayetteville and risk losing.
Alabama played Texas, Oregon and Clemson. Not that much better. Vandy played Marquette,Iowa State, Butler and Minnesota. That is better but Butler and Minny were tournament games. Arkansas did not go to a tournament. It will next year.
South Carolina also was in a preseason tournament. Our SOS was hurt because Texas being really down and Oklahoma State being in the middle of the pack.
Having said all this, I do think we should play a school from ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and PAC 12 each year.
Whether we like it or not SC deserved the 7 seed over us even with them not playing well the last month. They beat Michigan which won the Big 10 tournament over Wisconsin. They beat Vermont a NCAA tournament team and they beat Florida. We lost to Minnesota and got hammered by Okie State an average team. In short not only do we need to schedule good teams we need beat some of them. I hate the 8 seed but I do understand it!
We were penalized for the horrible loss to Missouri and the Bad loss at home to Mississippi State ! That’s why we are a 8 seed. Also we need to beat those power 5 schools we play in the nonconference schedule. I don’t like being sent to Tim buck two when Tulsa is less than 100 miles from campus! If you want to complain there’s one to complain about not the seed.
Our team will get more talented in the next few years and if God willing we will play in the Dance with a higher seed! I’m happy we are going to the dance.
Uh, Vandy did not play any ACC teams this year. So your premise is faulty.
Their best NC games were Butler (Big East), Marquette (Big East), Minnesota (Big Ten), Middle Tenn (CUSA), Dayton (Atlantic 10), and Iowa State (Big 12), all top 60 in RPI now. Belmont and Bucknell were just outside the top 60 as well. You are correct that strength of schedule got Vandy into the tournament, but the ACC had zip to do with it.
By comparison we played four top 60 NC teams – Minny, Houston, UT-Arlington and Okie State, and nobody in the 60-100 RPI range.
NC scheduling is a crap shoot. If you schedule a Duke or Villanova, they’re going to be very good, but there are questions beyond that. I’m sure IP-Fort Wayne thought beating Indiana was going to be a major feather in its cap. It probably still is, but IU wound up 79th in RPI. We thought Texas would be a credible NC opponent; they just set the school record for most losses in a season.
I’ve discussed this repeatedly before, but there are limitations on who Mike can schedule. They include:
- This is probably the biggest one. Big Six conference schools (the Power 5 plus Big East) do not want to play in BWA, even if we promise a return game at their place. This year we have one home-and-home opponent: Minnesota, who apparently will come to BWA next year. When Eddie Sutton used to schedule games against North Carolina and Wake Forest 35 years ago, they wouldn’t come to Fayetteville, and we wouldn’t go to Chapel Hill or Winston-Salem. In our recent series with Wake, they did come to BWA and we went to their building. Same with Clemson. But it doesn’t happen much. Jim Boeheim was extremely unhappy that Syracuse had to come to BWA in the Big East-SEC Challenge a few years back (Syracuse probably plays fewer NC road games than any major school; if we sold 30,000 tickets a night, we would do the same). Some of our recent home and home NC series have been with teams outside the Big Six, like Dayton and SMU. Both good teams, but not in the top-echelon conferences. The way to get around that is to play the big boys in made-for-TV neutral site games, which is frequently what schools like Duke and Michigan State do, but we haven’t been consistently good enough to attract those made-for-TV dates (maybe next year). It’s what we tried to do with Texas, except that Texas then turned around and sucked. Not that Texas sucking is ever a bad thing. :lol:
Another option is to get games in the interconference challenges, which we do with the Big 12 now (Okie Lite this year), but you can only get one of those per year. South Carolina inexplicably didn’t even get into that this year, although four SEC teams have to be left out because the Big 12 can’t count to 12.
- We have 18 conference games, 9 home, 9 road, and need to play 8 or 9 NC games at BWA because that’s what they base their season ticket revenue on. If we played fewer home games, the season ticket prices and thus income would decrease accordingly. Plus we play one annually in North Little Rock. That only leaves 1 to 4 games a year for neutral sites or road games. We have tended to get into these so-called classics (Minnesota’s this year) because it allows us to schedule extra games. This year’s breakdown: Two NC roadies, Minny and Okie Lite, and Okie Lite was part of the Challenge. Neutral site game with Texas. NCAA also counts NLR as a neutral site. 18 games at home. Nine SEC roadies. So 11 roadies, two neutral and 18 home in our 31 regular season games. Without that Minnesota “classic”, we might have just had the Okie Lite game as an NC roadie, and we might only have played 28 games instead of 31.
Swine do you have any other insight on our schedule next year?
There were plenty of reasons Arkansas could and probably should have been above USCe. You can make an argument for USCE but to say “like it or not” they deserved it over us is a big overstatement.
Usce was 43 in the RPI. Arkansas was 28. Arkansas beat them head head on their home court. You cite SOS. They are 42 we are 46. There is virtually no difference in the SOS.
Usce finished the season 22-10, 12-6 and going 3-6 to end the season. Arkansas finished 25-9, 12-6 (ahead of USC in SEC) and 8-2 in the last 10.
The RPI, last 10 games, head to head games and overall and conference records are often things the Committee points to in seeding.
So, no, Usce wasn’t clearly more deserving of a 7 than us. You can argue it and make some points but there are also plenty of reasons Arkansas has a beef on this issue.
I’m operating on failing memory (and not very much sleep), but we’re playing in the 16-team Phil Knight Invitational in Portland. We’ll play three neutral court games in Portland on Thanksgiving weekend IIRC. Other teams include Butler, Duke, UNC, OU, Oregon, Ohio State, Michigan State, Stanford and Gonzaga (yes, I looked it up; no way I would have remembered that detail even if I’d known it to begin with). Looks like there are two teams each from the Pac-12, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big East, plus four more fill-ins (Gonzaga being one of the fill-ins). Florida is the other SEC team. Seems like they wanted UK for this one but Kentucky was already spoken for that weekend, so they got us. It’s set up as two eight-team brackets and the teams from the same conference will be separate, so we can’t play Florida.
Some other high profile Nike schools also had schedule conflicts and couldn’t make the PKI, including Arizona and Villanova. So UK wasn’t the only one. And I’m pretty sure all 16 schools have shoe/apparel deals with Nike. No adidas or Under Armour on those courts.
Just playing in that should be huge for the RPI and the resume, especially if we hold our own.
It definitely should help. I would love to see us get a chance to beat Michigan State, Duke, and/or Gonzaga.