Most of the basketball teams who are left in the Big XII (or will it be the Big X??) Conference in 2011-12 are expected to change their non-conference scheduling.
And I can't say I blame them.
Their reasoning is simple. Teams like Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri will go from a 16-team conference slate to a round-robin format where each team plays a home-and-home against the other nine teams for a total of 18 games.
It used to be 14-2 would all but guarantee a team like KU the conference title. A year from now, it's possible 14 wins could still take the title only with four losses to boot!
"We put together a tough schedule with a few games that we still have to return," Oklahoma State coach Travis Ford recently told The Wichita Eagle. "I probably wouldn't have scheduled those games if I knew we were going to an 18-game league schedule. You're talking about 18 games against the best competition in the country. You can't kill yourself out of conference."
The majority of the conference coaches agree with Ford. In fact, nine of the 10 coaches told The Wichita Eagle they planned to downgrade the quality of future non-conference opponents.
"Those 18 games are going to be a grind, and when it's over your conference record is going to speak for itself,"Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg said. "You've got to find a way, especially when you're a team like us, to get some wins early in the season and build some momentum before conference play."
This year, for instance, Big XII teams had 15 non-conference games. They scheduled tough competition or as we fans liked to call them, resume builders, that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee would use next March to seed the tournament.
Starting next year, don't expect to see as many "Duke", "Arizona" and "UNLV" on these teams' schedules in November and December. You'll probably be seeing more Alcorn State and Alabama A&M on the dockets.
"You're increasing your games against high-major opponents by two," Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel told The Wichita Eagle. "You're going from 16 to 18. For teams like us in the south, now we're getting Kansas twice, Missouri twice, Kansas State twice. That makes things a lot more difficult. It could be like the Big East. It's definitely going to change the way we schedule."
"If you want to keep your number of hard games the same you may back off a little bit during your non-conference," KU coach Bill Self said told The Wichita Eagle. "Right now, our goal is to play six high-major games a year non-conference. So that number may go to four, that number may go to five.
"But I think very few schools will keep it at six, if that's their number. That's an awful lot. That would be 24 games of the 31, and then you've got the postseason tournaments. That's a pretty high-stress situation."
K-State's Frank Martin also figures to be pretty selective just like Self at KU. Martin may be trying to fill his 2011-12 schedule with the likes of Alcorn State as there are currently return games lined up against Virginia Tech, Alabama and Florida in addition to a December trip to Cancun, Mexico.
I just hope in the next couple of years Martin will seriously look at resuming the series against Wichita State. There is no reason a four-year contract couldn't be signed to get this rivalry started again. Play two games in Wichita, one at WSU and one at Intrust Arena, and two in Manhattan or better yet, how about this: sign a five-year contract, play four games as mentioned above but play the fifth at the Sprint Center in Kansas City. Can you imagine the crowds for that?
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