Hey BM WHere are the links to the 5’parts? Thank you

BM, thank you very much for posting this.  It is a fascinating and extremely well-researched series.

With a 13,000 seat arena and a very strong basketball pedigree, Dayton should seemingly have certain advantages in scheduling over GW.  However, this report does an excellent job in explaining why these are drying up.  As someone said, the bigger conferences have figured this out.  Many are expanding to 20 game conference seasons, plus have assigned interconference games (i.e. ACC-Big 10 Challenge), a holiday tournament against a strong field, and historical rivalries.  With all of these games already on the schedule, the major conferences do not need to line up A10 type programs to round out their schedules.  They can play 4 or 5 games against sub-300 teams and not at all penalized by the NCAA selection committee for its schedule. 

Not that it should matter for this season, but one thing GW should  absolutely never agree to do again is play in a holiday tournament with as weak a field as this upcoming Bahamas tournament.  These holiday tournaments represent practically one of the final ways that GW can play major programs in the nonconference schedule.  

Neil Sullivan, Dayton's AD, said he still contacted the top 75 programs in the country but was turned down by most.  Sullivan is a very impressive guy based on the way he approaches putting together UD's schedule.  I can only hope that GW is devoting a similar level of time and energy into creating its schedule.

I understand that the BCS conferences are afraid to schedule games against the A10 and the fact that most of the BCS conferences are expanding to a 20-game conference schedule makes it even easier for them to duck strong teams from lower-rated conferences, but I think all the holiday tournaments/2-day events that have popped up in recent years have given the A10 a lot more opportunities against BCS teams. The A10 hasn't fared too well in these tournaments/events against BCS teams in recent years, but I think it's a great sign that the A10 teams can get as many as 5 games against BCS teams due to all these tournaments/events. 

We know that Jamion Christian intentionally put together a soft OOC schedule for GW because the team is rebuilding and he wants to get all the wins he can, but if/when he turns things around, I don't think it would be that hard for him to get GW into 2-day events like last year when GW played Michigan and South Carolina, or a tournament like the Diamondhead Classic(I think that was the name of that tournament) that GW won during the 2014-2015 season. Sure, the BCS teams can duck A10 teams when they dictate who they want to play, but they can't dictate who plays in the OOC tournaments. 

A final thing about A10 scheduling and somewhat off topic is, Maryland has scheduled a home game against George Mason this year. Maryland used to play George Mason on a regular basis until the late 90's when George Mason almost beat them at College Park, Gary Williams got scared and never scheduled them again. Does anyone know how this game came about? George Mason has been down in recent years, but they have a good enough track record(along with GW) to where Georgetown and Maryland would be scared to play them. Why did Mark Turgeon schedule them? I'm assuming if M.Turgeon is willing to play George Mason, he'd be willing to schedule GW in the future.