July 31st Update and Contract Duffle Bag

 

Bahama Brackets and Finally... Some Schedules!

Docket Filling Up

All it took was me spending a week at the beach for teams to finally start churning out some schedules. After seeing just 23 schedules through the first three-quarters of July a whopping 14 schedules dropped in the final week.  A pleasant surprise is that the schedules are coming from a wide array of conferences, which is typical for late July but is untypical for the first 40 schedules. Releases are still miles behind average pace but it's about time things look to be picking up before it became "a story" much like the 2020 offseason.

One of the more interesting stories from this weeks releases is we see Charleston and Tulane engaging in an in-season home and home, a strategy talked about recently to alleviate the pressure to fill out a schedule with games at a lower cost. Very few surprises on the schedules released, aside from long travel trips, such as Winthrop to Washington State.

Conference Opponents and Schedules

The SEC and AAC also released their 2021-22 opponent rotations this week, which is the only thing that happened involving those conferences this week. In other conference schedule news, both the CAA and Sun Belt released their schedules and with the release of UAB's schedule the puzzle of the C-USA schedule (the conference that refuses to release a composite schedule) is filled in just a tad bit more.

Sub-Tropical Brackets!

A handful of events organized by BDGlobal, Bar Mar Bahamas & Nassau Championships, Naples Invitational and Gulf Coast Showcase, released their brackets this week, along with the Battle4Atlantis. The Atlantis event features defending National Champions Baylor and a slew of teams ready to take a swing at the champs. The highest profile opening round game looks to be Auburn vs. Connecticut, but Loyola-Chicago vs. Michigan State should be a fantastic game as well.

The Baha Mar field of Maryland, Richmond, Louisville and Mississippi State will be a great event as these teams all have much to prove after all four teams began last season with eyes on an NCAA Tournament but Maryland's 10-seed being the only successful campaign of the four.

The other three events feature 8-team brackets filled with mid-majors. There are plenty of quality teams in these events, and the winners will surely find themselves in important discussions come March.

Contract Duffle Bag

Southern University

One big duffle bag of contracts was waiting for me upon my return from vacation, the games on Southern's schedule so far are typical for SWAC teams, many guarantee games of various rates. The season opener at Louisville has been in the public space for some time, and is a hold-over contract from last season. The Jaguars will spend a few December nights in Ohio to play Akron, Kent State and Dayton, the latter two in succession as part of a single trip prior to Christmas.

July 16th Update

 ESPN Event Line-Ups News and More

Where Are All of The Games?

As the calendar rolls over to mid-July the schedule hounds are still waiting for pace to pick up as this week the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th teams released their 2021-22 non-conference schedules. A quick look back reveals that this total is falling more and more behind the pace of recent history. An average of 62 teams would have had a schedule out based off date from the previous decade while the 2021 offseason has produced less than 1/3rd of that amount.

What's going holding everything up? 

GUARANTEE GAMES

2020 reeked havoc on university budgets and that havoc has trickled down into the scheduling of college basketball games. Fewer and fewer teams down the pyramid are looking to write guarantee checks this season while more and more are looking to collect them. This is creating a huge imbalance in supply and demand leading to a stalemate in the search for games. If teams are going to fill their schedules then coaches will have to start getting creative. But what are some creative options for these coaches?

In-Season Home & Homes

In any given year the only in-season home-and-homes to be seen on the entire Docket are between the triangle of New Mexico, New Mexico State and UTEP. With all 3 teams isolated geographically and that they are all in separate conferences makes it very tempting for the trio to fill their schedules up with games against each other.

This season, however, more and more teams are deciding to play in-season home & homes. It's a zero sum move, costing neither team additional money outside of travel expenses. 

Back-to-Backing

This idea seems less likely as it requires the cooperation of the game buyer but if circumstances are right it could work well for both buyer and seller. In this scenario a buying team would host an opponent for games on back-to-back nights. Deals like this could be agreed to for less than the cost of two separate buy games and would also reduce travel expenses. But buying teams would not agree to this deal with any old opponent, any strength of schedule anchors would get a "hard pass" and even still there is the old adage of it being harder to beat a team twice.

Piggybacking

This is an old trick. Get a guarantee game to pay for your flight to an area flush with competition and extend your trip to play a few more road games on the same trip. This could even be combined with an in-season home & home to get more bang for your buck.

For a hypothetical example:

• NC Central and Lipscomb could agree to an in-season home & home
• NC Central agrees to buy-game at Vanderbilt with travel expenses included, and plays at Lipscomb during the same trip
• Lipscomb agrees to a buy-game at Duke with travel expenses included, and plays at NC Central during the same trip.

ESPN Event Brackets Released

Yesterday was one of the most pivotal days of the offseason as ESPN released most of it's event brackets. It was only "most" because someone at ESPN forgot to ask for their participants for their tentative schedules and, according to reports from Jon Rothstein, pitted Old Dominion and East Carolina against each other in the opening round of the Charleston Classic without realizing the two teams had already agreed to begin a home-and-home this season. While it's not terribly uncommon for teams to play in events with other teams already on their schedule (especially in ye olde days of non-bracketed games) but any potential match-ups are usually confined to the third round of the event with about a 12.5% chance of happening.

You can view all the match-ups here, but some of my favorite opening round games and potential match-ups are as follows:

Memphis vs Virginia Tech (NIT Season Tip-Off in Brooklyn, NY)

One of the best first round-up games pitting the defending post-season NIT Champs against an at-large NCAA team. The Tigers ended up 31st in KenPom in spite of missing the NCAA Tournament, this will not be an opportunity they want to slip by.

North Texas vs Kansas (ESPN Events Invitational in Kissimmee, FL)

North Texas escaped C-USA and was able to knock-off Purdue in the NCAA Tournament and will be up to the challenge against the Jayhawks. Kansas' last game against a C-USA team didn't go as planned, getting pushed to the bring by UTEP in Allen Fieldhouse this past March. The Jayhawks trailed the entire game until the final minutes in which they scored the final, and deciding five points, of the game.

BYU vs Liberty (Potential Diamond Head Classic Final in Honolulu, HI)

This game would be fun for lots of reasons outside of basketball on top of both programs aiming to be Top 50 teams this season. Crack open a cold beer to enjoy this one, something supporters of either program will NOT be doing.

Contract Duffle Bag

After an initial wave the influx of contracts has slowed down, but follow-ups requests will be sent out in early August to catch any games that have been signed in July. 

USC Upstate

The Spartans have a schedule comprised mostly of buy games at this point. They will open the season with trips to South Carolina and Charlotte and will also visit East Tennessee State and Furman before the end of November. They will make a trip to Winston-Salem to face Wake Forest just before exams and also still have a date to nail down with Tennessee, a game postponed from the 2020-21 season.

Cal State Fullerton

On top of contracts, The D1 Docket was lucky enough to obtain a nearly completed schedule for Cal State Fullerton, including their Big West Schedule. The most notable news being that the Titans will head to Flagstaff to participant in an MTE at Northern Arizona along with UT Rio Grande Valley

July 2 Update:

Conference Challenge News and More

In this transition week between June and July scheduling news is starting to pick up, not so much in the teams releasing schedules but in other news. This week the ACC/B1G Challenge match-ups were released, a few MTE schedules dropped and on top of that schedule hounds like the Docket and beat writers have a dug up a slew of games. Among all the noise, four teams were able to release their non-conference schedule.

Ole Miss got in on the game early by releasing their home schedule on Monday, but by the end of the week their complete schedule was released with the announcement of the Holiday Hoopsgiving event details. The Rebels will only have to leave Oxford for their trip to South Carolina for the Charleston Classic and their trip to Atlanta for the above mentioned event, will they will meet perennial SEC spoilers Western Kentucky. COVID delays means that Ole Miss' games against Memphis and Dayton will both be at home during the same season. The Rebels also drew a home game in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge, hosting Kansas State at home in late January. The rest of the home slate is filled with guarantee games and the return game with Middle Tennessee from the Kermit Davis buy-out series.

Conference mates Iowa State and Kansas State both also joined the party this week as both teams look to crawl out of the Big 12's basement this season. The Cyclones will get baptized during the first week of the season when Oregon State visits Ames fresh off their Elite 8 run. Conference challenge games against Creighton and Missouri along with their rivalry game with Iowa will be Iowa State's shot to make a statement that last season is behind them. Getting a win against a NIT Tip-Off field of Memphis, Virginia Tech and Xavier will be a tough task but any success will be an indicator of improvement. Kansas State's road to an NCAA resume relies on knocking off Arkansas and or Illinois in front a Wildcat heavy crowd at the Hall of Fame Classic in Kansas City, MO. Their remaining higher profile match-ups are all road games at Wichita State, Nebraska and Ole Miss. Both Iowa State and Kansas State fill out a large share of their schedule with buy-games, looking to keep their overall win-loss record strong going into conference play.

George Mason also released their schedule, which would not surprise regular readers as the bulk of George Mason's games have been nailed down for a few weeks. What the Patriots were waiting is the schedule for the Crossover Classic which was announced within their schedule. The Patriots open with Washington and close with the hosts, South Dakota State, sandwiched around their game with Nevada. 

The biggest news this week, however, was the release of the ACC/B1G Challenge games, being the last to feature Coach K's Duke and the first since 2002 without Roy Williams. Duke drew a road game at Ohio State, being their first trip to Columbus since running into the Jared Sullinger buzz-saw in 2011. Juwan Howard will take Michigan into the Dean Dome for Hubert Davis' first go-round in the competition as North Carolina's head coach. Other big match-ups include Louisville at Michigan State, Wisconsin at Georgia Tech, Iowa at Virginia and Florida State at Purdue

Contract Duffle Bag

It was a slow week for receiving contracts, with most responsive documents only including one or two games which have been tweeted out as received. But one bonafide duffle-bag did arrive.

Western Illinois

The Leathernecks have a built a schedule filled with regional contemporaries, among the 8 games committed to this season 3 are part of home & homes with close opponents, while two more neighbors are being played as part of a round-robin MTE. Western Illinois opens up on the road at Nebraska and will also visit DePaul as part of their MTE. Also of note, while the original contract signed in 2019 with Miami-Ohio stipulated a December 4th game this season a contract which can be assumed to supersede that deal was signed last November which shifts this year's game date into the realm of uncertainty. A game at Central Michigan on December 5th puts the idea of playing that game on December 4th on very shaky ground.