(04-20-2017 01:09 AM)robertfoshizzle Wrote:  It actually works out a lot neater for 15 teams than 12, though. If you did the same thing with the AAC, it would end up being a 16-game schedule. I have played around with some numbers to get this type of model to 18 games (20 would actually be easier), but I'm never quite satisfied with it. I am sure a statistician or a computer program could figure it out though.

I think you can keep it simple and achieve a similar outcome. Have the 3 tiers. Base it off of a 3 year average or whatever. Tier 1 would play home and home with Tier 1 and 2 which is 14 games and then 4 games against the bottom teams. So you protect your top 4 teams from playing the teams that won't invest to improve or have god awful RPI's. I don't think anything is perfect but you need the top 8 playing each other as often as you can not only to improve your RPI and other metrics but I am sure those games are also much more attractive to tv partners. The hope is the basement teams don't want to be in the basement anymore and they improve so much that the bottom 4 isn't so bad anymore. At the moment there are only 3 teams that are in a bad place. Tulane, ECU and USF. So someone will get screwed to join these 3 but it is what it is. And hopefully Dunleavy gets things going at Tulane, USF hired a new coach so it really leave ECU as the only program not actually trying to improve.

Based on 3 year conference records and adding Wichita to the top since we have no data other than they were the top team in the MVC.

Tier 1
Wichita St
SMU
Cincinnati
Temple

Tier 2
Tulsa
Connecticut
Houston
Memphis

Tier 3
UCF
East Carolina
Tulane
South Florida