I mostly agree with GW 0509's list, but I would add a couple of extra layers to it.

Geographic Preferences
- Let's extend this beyond the Mid-Atlantic and include the Northeast into this as well. I enjoy when we play BU and Vermont, and I think between Buffalo, the MAAC, the Patriot league and the Ivy's there are enough KenPom 100-200 teams in a given year to build a respectable schedule where we won't be at major athletic disadvantages.

Brand Preferences
- The Ivy's very much fall into this, but I think it is important to sell the fanbase on playing brands that we'd like to consider like-minded institutions, or brands that have college basketball history and are recognizable. Sure it's fun to play Power 5 teams, especially when we get them into the Smith Center, but for college hoop fans Iona is a brand that they see in their brackets half the decade. Especially the next few years while Pitino is there, that could be a game that pulls in 2,200 to Smith Center, instead of 1,000 for Radford. College of Charleston I similarly think of as a basketball school that basketball fans will have more familiarity with than say James Madison. Similarly the academic brand of the IVy's makes them an interesting draw on the schedules and I've enjoyed our dates with Harvard and Princeton in recent years. Yale and Penn would also be fun to play home and away.

Assuming the typical non-conference schedule will be 13 games moving forward, here's an example of an ideal schedule template from my vantage point.

- American
- Howard
- @ ACC (buy game)
- @ MTE for 3
- Penn (part of home and home)
- Xavier (part of home and home)
- @ Buffalo (part of home and home)
- UMES
- @ Iona (part of home and home)
- @ Penn St (part of home and home)
- Harvard (part of home and home)

In this particular cycle you'd have Xavier, Penn and Harvard as your home sells to fans, presumably with Penn St., Pitino and Buffalo coming in the following year. Is it the sexiest? No. But to real colle

Again, I'm trying to reserve my judgment until we know the final results of this process, but I am hopeful that somehow a reporter will get hold of the financials involved in this once the hire is made. I understand we won't know what's being promised in terms of resource allocation for the travel and such, but knowing the final dollars and cents of the contract will be very helpful in figuring out how to feel about things.

2twooed wrote:

There is a small group of fans who continue to step up donation wise. The baseball field has most of the names of people who contributed. The Colonial Club although the attendance dropped dramatically this year still has people who donate. I don’t think the current administration really cares about the fan base. The AD needs to make the right hire ASAP or we are looking at a John Kuester year. I’m pretty confident the hire will be a mediocre one.

Who is the right hire?

So the answer to your question is essentially that the primary computer metrics that get referenced (KenPom and the NET) tend to me more predictive based on data than they are contextual.

For example, with KenPom, based on the data points that are going into his formula, he is generating a prediction for how each game will play out (basically a point spread). Based on KenPom's metrics right now, if Wisconsin played Penn St in Madison tomorrow, Wisconsin would be roughly a 11.5 point favorite. Assuming it was the same type of spread when they met earlier in the season, Wisconsin's two point win actually hurt their ranking in KenPom rather significantly because they missed the prediction by 10 points. Wisconsin and Providence's knack for winning close games is almost derided by the "luck" category in KenPom, where the badgers rank 4th and the Friars 3rd.

My issue with winning more close games than the law averages suggests being classified as "lucky" is that the computer is not watching games and evaluating "lucky" plays throughout the course of a game. For example a banked in three from 32 feet with 12 minutes left in the first half goes into the dataset the exact same way that a swished three off beautiful ball movement does. Now Wisconsin's two baked in shots to beat Purdue did involve quite a bit of luck, but the reason Wisconsin and Providence have fared so well in tight games this year has more to do with the fact they don't turn the ball over late and always seem to generate a shot in closing moments and they defend without fouling on the other end. These are skills and not just things that can be defined by expected values and the corresponding results in small sample sizes.

My hope for both programs is that the committee will value their results more so than their metrics, as Wisconsin will have a legit case to be a 1 seed if it wins both the Big 10 regular season and tournament titles and Providence should get consideration for a 2 seed if it can do the s

I find this thread to be very interesting because it just feels like we’re fighting to fight at this point and not seriously establishing a set of clear expectations and measuring how we are stacking up against them at this point. Just a few thoughts:
 
-While I do believe that Lonergan laid a blueprint for what GW could hope to be in the more modern era, one that we are clearly far away from reaching at the current moment as FQ points out, I also believe Rising is right that our current situation makes getting back there much more difficult. The run of postseason berths from Jarvis through 07 is not a reasonable goal to me at this point. A litany of factors from conference re-alignment, administrative support, no longer having a “basketball guy” as an AD, etc.. make it less likely in my opinion.

-The idea that our program was “destroyed” by the end of the Lonergan/Nero debacle and 3 years of Mojo is a farce to me. Sure, JC was left with a cupboard bereft of talent, but he was not up against NCAA sanctions, limited scholarships, limits on recruiting or any of that. As we learned from Lonergan, it only takes a couple good recruiting cycles to flip a program from bad to good if you develop the talent you bring in.

-Rising, you’re killing me with this notion that “what matters most” is that we’re playing more like a KenPom 150’s team right now than what our season long metric indicates. It’s one thing to strive to peak and play your best basketball in March, but if you waste the first two months of the year playing like a sub 250 team, all you’re ever going to set yourself up for is needing to pull off a miracle in the A 10 tourney to reach a postseason tournament. Two things are allowed to be true; we can both pleased that JC’s group has improved over the course of the year three straight years and be pissed that they look woefully unprepared to compete with Big West, Patriot League and MEAC foes when the season starts.

-I was a believer

I'm probably not the nest person to comment on this, because I really haven't seen the team play much since the first five games of the season due to work conflicts, but it does feel like these numbers address what has been my overall concern with the program under JC. The fact that our offensive rating in 19-20 dwarfed what we've seen this year matches up with my memory of how much more fluid and organized we looked with Armel running the point. While the last two years have involved an influx of talent into the program, what I saw to begin this year (and basically all of last year) was a lot of shot hunting by guards prioritized over collapsing defenses and whipping the ball side to side. When I've poked my head in in recent weeks, there seems to be some optimism that Brayon can be the initiating PG that Armel was for us in 19-20. I hope to see that when I next tune in. However, if all I see is a more efficient heliocentric bucket getter than JB squared, my optimism will quickly be tempered.

Gwmayhem wrote:

As much as GWRising or anyone would like to make this a fact based discussion, the answer to whether this is one of the worst OOC schedules in the country or not boils down to one's opinion.  Asking us to ignore the application of quadrants is foolish.  It's a strong enough metric for the NCAA selection committee to use but it's not good enough to analyze GW's schedule?  Hardly.

I'm guessing the 206 SOS ranking is based on the cumulative won-loss record of one's opponents which as we all know is badly misleading.  Everyone knows that a 7-3 Villanova should not be treated exactly the same as a 7-3 Marshall or a 7-3 Southern Utah.

We should all be able to agree that most of the "bad sounding teams" on our schedule are not terrible.  All but three presently have records of .500 or better.  The median KenPom ranking of our OOC opponents is 224, not good but not terrible.

The problem again boils down to quadrants or not enough quality opponents.  Am not suggesting that we would have won such games, only that playing them would have resulted in playing a tougher schedule.

Based on KenPom rankings, here is how our 13 games break out:

KenPom Ranking                # of Opponents

1-49                                              0
50-99                                            2
100-149                                        1
150-199                                        3
200-249                                        4
250-299                                        1
300+                                             2

Over half of the opponents are in the 155-243 range.  

So, if you're a really bad program and this is your schedule, you can claim it was challenging.

If you're GW and your KenPom ranking is 252, as the 252nd best team in the country, you can look at this schedule and c

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