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Post by ggopher on Nov 28, 2014 11:13:58 GMT -5
I like the idea, but the only change I would make is that the championship game be played on the home court of the team with the best record. There has to be some reward for getting the most wins in the season. That way Penn State has a more than even chance of winning the B1G every year. I for one would not go and watch NEB vs. PSU in Minneapolis, as I detest both of them. We simply cannot have someone other than NEB or PSU winning the title.
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Post by Wiswell on Nov 28, 2014 11:19:26 GMT -5
Right. Because when Nebraska won it didn't matter they didn't play Illinois at ChamBana.
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Post by ggopher on Nov 28, 2014 11:23:38 GMT -5
The volley gods are appeased when this happens, and America is better able to fight terrorism when PSU and NEB win.
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Post by ggopher on Nov 28, 2014 12:28:19 GMT -5
I would like to see PSU and NEB be forced to play each other 4 times during the season, so I can savor all the whining from their fans about how unfair it is. Everyone else gets an easy schedule and is allowed to play against out of conference cupcakes whenever they want.
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Post by badgerbreath on Nov 28, 2014 13:24:28 GMT -5
While the unbalanced schedules are not ideal, conference tournaments (IMO) cheapen the regular season. If a team battles the slog of regular season - with the travel, the hostile road crowds, the short-turnarounds, the odd scheduling - and finishes in first place, they should be the conference champ...period. To then turn around and have another team be crowned champion makes no sense to me. Especially if the lowest seeded team in the tournament goes on a hot streak and wins the tournament. Don't forget 2010, South Carolina State won their conference tournament and qualified for the NCAA tournament even though they had 22 losses. 22!!! How is that good for volleyball? I agree with this as it relates to the Big 10. The main driver for a conference tournament in the Big Ten is that the unbalanced schedule is not fair. If they went to the Cook plan of a 20th game used to determine the champion. What if you have a two 18-1 teams from one division and the winner of the other division was 16-3. Some tie-breaker determines which of the 19-1 teams plays for the championship - then losses and the 16-3 team become champion, and which part of this is 'fair'?
I was thinking - what if the Cook plan was just a way to get a 20th game that was more competitive. The 20th game counts the same as the other 19 and best record wins the conference. Still may be worse than the current system - 6 of the 7 best teams in the conference could be in one division, so the team w/o the other 5 good teams in their division would have a considerably easier schedule and probably win the conference. At the end of the day - the current system is probably going to be the best - with maybe some tweaks to the schedules that increases the chances of more H2H games of the 'top' teams.
You are right that that scenario would cause controversy -- that is one reason why I argued for a 2 game mini-tournament of 4 teams -- but I think it would be pretty rare scenario. Obviously the whole point of the championship match or the mini tournament is that a champion in one division (in this case most likely the B1G west) could have a poorer W-L record simply because they faced a much more competitive schedule, so its a feature not a bug if a team with a poorer W-L wins the championship match. (Granted, many people will be uncomfortable with that per se.) The real question is whether it is ever likely that one division will be weaker top to bottom, and will therefore spit out an inferior team with a not so good W-L record that has the potential to win the championship in a one off encounter -- thereby cheapening the whole season. I don't know the chances of that. Once you get to 7-8 team divisions, I begin to think that gets unlikely IF the divisions are constructed sensibly and the logistics of a championship match could be worked out. (Those are B1G ifs!!). I also really don't know how often a randomly generated 20 game schedule with a 14 (or 16) team conference, would produce wildly unbalanced results that would justify a realignment into divisions. I'm guessing there might be a way to simulate this given the past fields in the B1G, but I haven't worked out the details yet. You would also have to simulate the effects of balancing schemes (using previous years records, for example) to even up schedules between similar strength teams. Given it's current and possibly future makeup, the idea of simple E-W divisions in the B1G seems like a bad idea to me. You're lumping a lot of traditionally strong teams (Neb, Minn, ILL, WI) in one division (the west) and one very dominant team in the other. If the choice is between that and some mechanism to balance the schedules, I would do the latter. There gets to be a point where the line between having divisions and rebalancing the schedule gets blurry.
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Post by austintatious on Nov 28, 2014 13:35:28 GMT -5
Whoever wins by the rules established is champion. No one has to play what if. The schools agreed to the format (somewhat reluctantly I assume) so not to disparage the champion. They didn't make the rule.
All of those who have complained about no balanced schedule could you please start writing MLB to play a balanced schedule? PLaying the same team 18 times a season in your division sucks. Look at some of the inequities in baseball scheduling and impacting winners. Ridiculous.
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Post by Wiswell on Nov 28, 2014 13:43:30 GMT -5
Not to mention every other Big Ten sport.
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Post by badgerbreath on Nov 28, 2014 14:54:34 GMT -5
You guys are of course right. Once the rules are established, everyone knows them. One should not gainsay them once they are set. I personally am on record thinking that the unbalanced schedule has not posed a problem so far. It only rankles if you cherry pick, or construct what if scenarios.
But looking forward with 14 teams, and possibly more, I'm not so sure about the future. A top team playing the bottom 4 teams twice and the other top four teams once would be at a substantial advantage. So I'm thinking proactively here, not in reaction to what happened this year or in prior years. Going forward, how to make sure things remain as fair as possible given the constraints, or the distortions imposed by other considerations - in this case a limited number of games for a large number of conference foes of uneven quality. I also don't want a solution that just replaces one possible problem with another, however.
BTW, one of the arguments for wild cards in the MLB postseason, besides revenue issues, was the unbalanced schedule that was itself forced by expansion. There is also the attempt in the MLB and the NFL to balance schedules within divisions for teams competing directly against each other. Rules do change to try to address shortcomings of an unbalanced schedule. One of the reasons I like european football is that they never have an unbalanced schedule. But, the B1G would never (and I think rightly) reach consensus on upper and lower division structure that makes that possible, so we can't use their solution.
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Post by psumaui on Nov 30, 2014 15:11:53 GMT -5
If there were a Conference championship next year I think the divisions would be divided like this:
West East
Illinois Maryland Indiana Michigan Iowa Michigan State Minnesota Ohio State Nebraska Penn State Northwestern Purdue Wisconsin Rutgers
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2014 15:32:01 GMT -5
If the B1G only gets six teams in the NCAA tourney, I guarantee you that there will be a different schedule in place next year. Seven teams in Sweet 16 to only 6 teams in tourney in one year.
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Post by Wiswell on Nov 30, 2014 15:43:20 GMT -5
Psumaui, you are absoluely right and that is why it is a terrible idea. PSU gets a good draw. Meanwhile Il, MN, NE, WI ALWAYS play twice.
Just keep rotating teams off the schedule. We have done it for four years now.
Rwilson, I dont think the schedule had anything to do with it. The conference lost a ton to graduation in 2013 and back in the spring it was predicted to be down. They still all played each other, but in years past Minnesota and Nebraska would have won more of those matches.
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Post by psu610 on Nov 30, 2014 17:45:42 GMT -5
I heard someone say they made the schedule back in April of 2013. PSU, NEB, and MIN were the top three then following the 2012 vball season.
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Post by pogoball on Nov 30, 2014 19:47:18 GMT -5
I'm throwing this out there: This year, AFAIK, they didn't take geographical location into consideration when putting together the schedule. So why would they take it into consideration for the divisions?
Put together a committee and come up with two balanced divisions, or perhaps do something like seed all the teams by RPI and fill the divisions with snake seeding.
Next year's divisions by RPI-Snake seeding:
Wisconsin Illinois Nebraska Penn St Ohio St Minnesota Michigan Michigan St Purdue Northwestern Indiana Iowa Maryland Rutgers
Maybe use this as a base and have a committee tweak it to make sure necessary rivalries are put in the same division. I think Michigan-MSU, Illinois-NW and Purdue-Indiana would probably want home & home. Any other rivalries?
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