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Ever since the ACC dropped the round-robin regular season schedule, the actual strength of each team’s conference schedule varies based on which teams are played twice.
[See the full post at: A Closer Look at Unbalanced Schedules]Va…I read the whole post over the grill, and nursing a cold one.
Your brilliance with numbers matched what my eyes have comnunicated for a good while.
I’m thinking that’s a good thing….
For both of us. Good for Duke FB this year, too.
This is one helluva knowledge drop and I read and then re-read this post to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Great work, VaWolf, and the kind of factual dissection that I really enjoy.
Great article, Great information. The home/home comparison really is simple yet accurate. The only factor that it does not pick up on is for the one time only opponents, who did you play on the road and who did you play at home.
Thanks for analysis of the road games as well.
Va wolf – correct me if I am wrong but doesn’t dance card include the old RPI for their evaluation? If so, Pitt’s roadies don’t matter as much.
Still…enjoy the data, and thanks to vawolf I am not surprised on selection Sunday.
Regarding the bubbles, I think those days are back. Gott wins enough to keep us near it, loses too much to clear it. I don’t see that changing too much during his tenure here. Hope like hell I am wrong.
Fantastic work. Just wow.
Like VA said, it’s hard to quantify – but definitely what you want as a midrange team is to get the shite foes on the road (where you should still beat them) and the elite at home (where you will at least have a decent shot). A weak foe at home is largely a waste of home court advantage.
Great work VaWolf! Two things that caught my eye. (1) This matrix really doesn’t change a great deal with one win or one loss. Take our near miss against WF that wouldn’t have changed much. (2) Steve Donahue deserves the Seth Greenberg/Paul Hewitt Parting Gift!!
I’ve always loved these posts. These are my favorite of the the posts here.
choppack1 – if the bubble days are back, at least it’s not for the same reason as the Herb days when it was play a weak OCC schedule and then hope you won enough conference games. It will be simply because the Wolfpack isn’t winning against a decent to hard schedule. I for one am thankful it appears we won’t be sweating the bubble because our schedule was too easy.
Okay … a few things here:
First off — Very thoughtful and thorough piece, VAWolf82.
Second — Where on God’s green earth do you find the time to compose such a detailed composition? It amazes me the time some of you have to devote to thought-filled analytics. It beats anything these pay-services want you to subscribe.
Finally — I know this will NEVER happen. But … humor me: What if we expand the conference to 16 Teams? I imagine the ACC could then separate into two unique divisions.
For this example (again … just humor me) let’s call it Old ACC vs. New ACC. Each division would have 8 unique teams. Each division would play a full round robin with one cross-over game from the other division per season.
Now, their are obvious problems that the folks in G-Town probably just wouldn’t ever go for. Not to mention the coaches. It would require a 22-game conference schedule. But … again … humor me: Think of how this would play?
You’re never going to satisfy everyone. But … maybe you could at least pacify the majority. A good portion of the “Old Big East” would be re-established … and we would get our cozy little “Old ACC” Conference back.
SO … here goes:
OLD ACC
NC State
UNC
DUKE
Wake Forest
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
VirginiaNew ACC
PITT
Syracuse
Boston College
Louisville
Miami
Virgina Tech
Notre Dame
*EXPANDED TEAMWho would the expanded team be? I’ll leave that for you all to ponder.
Any thoughts on this proposal?
^Navy for the 16th ACC team.
These posts are why I keep coming back to SFN to read basketball stories. Even after all the ref conspiracy debates. TJW ’15 campaign begins today.
Good stuff. Its more meaningful to consider a more quantitative evaluation, such as RPI as opposed to rankings, here focused on conference records.
“I’m not going to go through my basic rant on the importance of OOC scheduling. ”
^But it never gets old, or unneeded.
Also, thanks for this work.
Nice work, don’t know how you find the time
UCONN for #16 -keep grabbing at a piece of that NY area market
Nice work. The unbalanced schedule really does make the conference standings a lot less meaningful to me. Who you get at home vs. who you get on the road is huge in my view. The chance to pick up road wins vs crappy teams is a hidden RPI booster.
I really liked the 8 team ACC with the Wake game ending the regular season every year. That’s how ACC Basketball is supposed to be.
Va wolf – correct me if I am wrong but doesn’t dance card include the old RPI for their evaluation? If so, Pitt’s roadies don’t matter as much.
Yea, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I should have kept that discussion in general terms and noted that the RPI advantage from road wins might not help Pitt much in clearing the bubble.
I’ll improve that next year and steal BJD’s reasoning on home/road games as well.
Good stuff. Its more meaningful to consider a more quantitative evaluation, such as RPI as opposed to rankings, here focused on conference records.
Jeremy, I’m not following you. What did you want to see?
I really liked the 8 team ACC with the Wake game ending the regular season every year. That’s how ACC Basketball is supposed to be.
I always wonder what the T.V. executives that enabled conference expansion, by giving out more lucrative deals to larger conferences are thinking.
No fan, of any conference, really likes conference expansion / realignment, but the T.V. deals keep driving it.
I mean at some point, you’d think a T.V. executive would say, “WTF? Nebraska versus Northwestern, as the game of the week? No more Nebraska versus Oklahoma rivalry? That’s not a good idea conference guys”.
But no, they’re like, “OMG! WVU versus TCU! That’s a rivalry I had dreams about as a kid! Sign us up!”
I really do not understand how the numbers work out for T.V. networks in this. I’d think the audience for a TCU v WVU game would not materially change, even though they are now in the same conference. The conference adds a few low interest games via expansion, but gets paid handsomely for it.
There are a few exceptions, like Texas A&M joining the SEC, but generally I do not see people going out of their way to watch Utah versus Standford in football.
It’s all about media markets, my friend. Seems to be working as everyone is making more. Don’t really get it, either. But that’s where we are. And probably not going back.
RE: TV driving conference expansion.
Like most things, it’s complicated. I see it as this. Everyone says they don’t like it, but then people watch the new games anyway (I haven’t looked at the numbers to prove this, so this is a hunch). As a TV exec, you pay attention to what people do, not what they say (Netflix is actually both the perfect anti-example and example of this. They put out shows like House Of Cards that were initially refused by TV, but then they also base their decisions off of what people are watching on Netflix).
The further questions is, why do TV execs benefit from conference expansion and are willing to pay out more money? One answer is that it’s live sport TV. It’s pretty much the only thing people are willing to watch live any more and are willing to watch the commercials. In the age of DVRs, the value of live TV has gone up. Therefore, more money for it.
Of course, this puts more demand for live sports. So the TV execs fight over the rights to the conferences. And if you’re a conference, you realize you can make more money by having more games to offer. Regardless of the actual quality of the games. The money comes from quantity in the short term, not quality. Therefore, conference expansion happens to have more games to offer. Now the deals command ever greater money. If you’re a TV exec, you also don’t complain so long as you can afford to pay the most (ESPN), because while expansion drives up the cost of the deals, you now have less partners to negotiate with. So ESPN can lock up the rights to most of the conferences by negotiating with 5 or 6 organizations instead of 10 or 12. And make no mistake, ESPN wants to own it all. The reason ESPNU and ESPN3 exist is so ESPN has someplace to show live games they have the rights to, since they can’t put them all on ESPN and ESPN2. This isn’t driven by ESPN really wanting to make money here, it’s to keep out competition. If ESPN doesn’t air the games they can get hit with antitrust lawsuits for hoarding. A small rival of ESPN actually did bring suite before ESPN launched ESPNU for this very reason.
Now back to the argument of the games being crap as rivalries are broken. ESPN doesn’t care. They now own the rights to all the games, so they can start to dictate what games they’d like to see and create the matchups that make them money. This was all detailed in a great New York Times series of articles last year. Think about where the ACC-BIG TEN Challenge came from. Think about why does Alabama play Virginia Tech in football to begin the season? Why did NC State play South Carolina? Behind the scenes you’ll find ESPN pulling strings to get games they can hype and make money on. ESPN doesn’t need to do this for a lot of games, so in basketball they just focus on the top and let the rest fend for themselves. And they make boatloads of money doing this.
And that is how conference expansion happens and makes lots of people money while destroying rivalries and seemingly leading to a worse product.
A bit of a digression, but worth telling I think.
Maybe it’s just the logistical practical side of me, but I’d switch out Virginia and Miami. Yes, it would break up the “old ACC,” but I’m thinking Miami would hate to have to travel that far North all the time for away games in the “old Big East” with most of the “old ACC” being within driving distance of each other.
Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy. Mao Zedong
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