Originally posted by pckank1:
Originally posted by mrjolly01:
Normally you are going to play in 1 or even 2 early season tournaments than can be anywhere from 2-4 games. In those cases you will end up with the RPI's of your tournament opponents which might be a little hard to plan, but some tournament fields are stronger than others. For wild guess let's say you have a total of 4 tournament games fairly evenly spread over the RPI range from 1 to 250 and you get an average of 125 out of those games. Then, by playing 3 in state and WVU should average somewhere in the 75 range. Now together you have an average of about 100 RPI over 8 games. You wouldn't need 6 home games with cupcakes because you only have 5 left, and still haven't accounted for any single games outside of the tournaments-state-WVU games. Of those remaining 5 I try to schedule 3 decent opponents, maybe a couple of power 5, and an A10 or Big East. Not bluebloods though because you don't need them with all the conference bluebloods we play. The remaining 2 can be cupcakes from the 250+ range, one as a season opener and another as a filler somewhere within the OOC schedule. It would be cutting it close, but I think overall if you win 8 of the 13 against that OOC and go .500 in the ACC with a couple of signature wins and no real bad losses you can get into the NCAA tournament. May need one ACC tournament win also by cutting it that close, but my point is that your SOS would elevate you into the discussion in that situation maybe more so than playing more cupcakes with the same number of ACC wins.
8 out of 13 OOC and 9-9 in the ACC would leave us at 17-14 before the ACC tourney, so if and when we get to 9-9 in the ACC, we would need to win at least 10 of our 13 OOC games to at least give us a shot at 19-12. To feel safer, we would probably need to go 10-3 OOC against a good schedule with a couple of quality wins, and 10-8 in the ACC for an overall record of 20-11 heading into the ACC tourney.
6 home cupcakes are fine if the other 7 OOC games are against a combination of decent to good teams. If we play in a good tourney in November, that can replace some of the 7 OOC games against good teams. Very few teams have less than 6 home "gimmes", so it would be foolish for us to have less, but, of course, 10 of them like this year is way too many.