Thank God VCU emerged victorious over George Mason.  As the new top seed in the A10, Lunardi (and I suppose others) can now place VCU safely in the field as an automatic qualifier.  Prior to this win, VCU did make the field as a play-in participant.  Their competition for these precious final few spots included Texas (#38 NET, 4-8 in Q1 games), Vandy (#43 NET, 3-8 in Q1 games), West Virginia (#48 NET, 5-9 in Q1 games), Nebraska (#54 NET, 5-9 in Q1 games), and Arkansas (#39 NET, 4-9 in Q1 games).  VCU is #31 NET and is 0-1 in Q1 games.  George Mason now has 6 other teams ahead of them in line to make the field.  They are 0-3 in Q1 games.

It's an annual rite of passage about this time each year.  The pattern is so easily discernible that it barely warrants repeating.  A10 teams get screwed because they can't get high quality wins, with the biggest reason for this being that they can't get high quality games outside of its own conference.  I heard someone on the radio say yesterday, "The Atlantic 10 is not a good conference.  It's a great conference."  Apparently, most majors share this belief at least to some extent.    Meanwhile, when you're a major, you'll get at least a dozen cracks at the apple and if you can win roughly 1/3 of these games, you'll likely find yourself in decent shape.

If you've watched VCU play at all this season, you know they've played like an NCAA caliber team.  Their average margin of victory has increased by over 10 points from a season ago and this presently stands at 8th in the country.  (By contrast, Drake, a dominant team playing lights out in their conference, ranks 38th.) VCU is 22-5 and have won 9 conference games by double figures.  In at least a very good conference if not a great one.  In short, in a season where VCU as of this moment should be comfortably in the field, they instead have to sweat it out with the biggest reason being that they can't get, and therefore win, Q1 games.

If I'm the A10, I'd consider this out of the box proposal.  First, don't worry about replacing UMASS.  A 14 team conference works fine.  I suppose if a program like Drake were interested, you'd want to look at this but who knows if they'd be a good fit or would even want to leave where they are.  In the east, who would you be considering?  Charleston?  Hofstra?  BU?  Belmont down south?  None are must-haves in my mind.  

So if we're staying at 14 teams, my proposal calls for annual home and homes with every conference team.  Yup, that's 26 games out of say 31.  If you're not getting very many Q1 games, then you wouldn't be missing out on these anyway.  Try and get to a MTE where you'll have a shot at high level competition. Play your OOC rivalry game if this exists.  Otherwise, you'll have no more than 5 dates to fill so if you only want to see cupcakes, have at it.  

It's easy to see how this idea hinders a school's opportunity to shoot for the moon but the fact is that no A10 teams have been landing on the moon for a while now.  Dayton came close this year by getting its biggest wins in Maui, a MTE.  By all means, keep scheduling MTE's.  Essentially, this is not an idea to improve the conference's NET rankings but the fact is that under the current system, there really isn't an opportunity to do so.  Even in 2014-15 when the conference sent 6 schools dancing, review these OOC schedules and let me know how many of these games would realistically be scheduled today.  Far less than half I would assume.

Meanwhile, A10 fans get a great schedule.  A10 players should thrive on more consistently challenging competition.  A10 coaches would likely pull their hair out but even CC is ahead of the curve on that front.  No, I am not expecting this to actually happen. But as our "great conference" continues to get screwed by NCAA committees because we are so lacking in Q1 wins, ignoring the fact that we can get so few of these games to begin with, I think this idea would be a great response.  You (majors) won't play us, so we'll play even more amongst ourselves.