The Effects of Realignment on Mid-Level Power Conference Teams
Posted by rtmsf on September 22nd, 2011Kenny Ocker (@kennyocker) is an RTC contributor.
With the flurry of conference expansion that has taken place since the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament, the biggest focus has been upon two subsets of teams: those that would be taken to new conferences, and those whose conferences would be dismantled around them. The former teams — a collection of powerful programs such as Syracuse and Pittsburgh, and basketball also-rans like TCU and Nebraska, and schools in between — have understandably been analyzed because they are the institutions affecting the change throughout the collegiate sports landscape. The latter programs — Big 12 litigious ursines Baylor chief among them — fear being left behind and have received plenty of attention about the prospect of falling out of the upper echelon of big-time, big-money college athletics. But there’s a third subset of programs affected by the changing composition of the conferences: the teams already within them. For the average team in an expanding major conference — teams like Oregon, Arkansas, or Georgia Tech — the impact of the expansion is one that hasn’t been looked at with the same level of scrutiny.
What Happens to Teams Like These in Conference Realignment? (AP/G. Broome)
So what is in store for these programs after this time of transition? The primary theme of uncertainty permeating the entire expansion process is just as applicable to these schools, and given the lack of coverage, it may actually be a more uncertain path. They possess similar conference structures, budgets and players, but they will face two fundamental problems exacerbated by the potential (or actual) growth of their conferences.
The first problem is likely to be the decreased amount of available challenging non-conference scheduling for teams. As their conferences grow, the pool of programs with similar statures that are available and willing to play them will diminish, both because teams will be able to play fewer teams as a result of the increased size of their conference and because of schools’ general unwillingness to play too many games against a single conference in one year.
The bigger problem for teams in expanding conferences is going to be the increased difficulty in separating the profiles of schools in the middle of the conference. Because teams can only play a finite number of conference games (usually capped at 18), the increased number of conference schools means that teams will get to play fewer opponents in their conference twice, and will not have the home-and-home results to help separate the good teams from the mediocre. Every time schools play twice, each school’s home-court advantage is neutralized, helping observers to objectively compare the two teams. With that element removed, there is less to measure teams by, and schools playing vastly different schedules in the same conference may end up with the same record even if one plays a far more difficult schedule than the other.
The lack of an ability to separate these teams through their conference performances will result in an environment in which RPI and strength of schedule are even more relied upon to differentiate bubble teams than the metrics already are. The Big East’s soon-to-be-obsolete 16-team alignment gives a good example of this, as 2011 national champion Connecticut finished ninth in the conference race at 9-9, but in fact had to play Louisville, Marquette and Notre Dame twice and faced every other conference foe only once. (The Cardinals and Fighting Irish were ranked in KenPom’s top 15, and the Golden Eagles came in 34th.) In comparison, Cincinnati, which finished two games ahead of the Huskies in Big East play at 11-7, drew Georgetown (40th), St. John’s (42nd) and DePaul (202nd) twice. Both teams made the NCAA Tournament — and because of its far more challenging nonconference schedule and impressive five-game championship run through the Big East Tournament, the Huskies ended up earning three seeds above the Bearcats despite their inferior conference record. That same sort of scenario where the strength of conference and nonconference schedules is a determining factor in NCAA Tournament seeding is one likely to be extrapolated as more and more teams find themselves in situations where computer numbers have to separate each team from rivals with similar conference records.
Given the impact that conference expansion potentially has on the average major-conference team, it’s interesting to see how that impact has become lost in the shuffle — literally.
