A Look At MIAA Schedules

If there is one thing about the summer I enjoy when it comes to D3 basketball its the anticipation and search for the next years schedules.  Every time one becomes available its like moving one step closer to the next season and putting the past one behind you.

In this section I just want to focus on the non-conference portion of the schedule for each MIAA team.   What you'll see is the schedule by dates, within those you'll see ' * ' which denote in-region games.  I'll point out the best and worst opponents and why.  At the end you'll see each schedule will get a 'score', a number on a 1-100 scale with 100 being the highest or toughest possible.  The difference in highest and lowest possible scores is just taking into account tournaments where the opponents are not yet set.

I could explain the math but I'll take the Paul Ryan approach and say it would take too long to explain.  Its actually fairly simple, probably not all that accurate and open to quite a bit of fluctuation given that its trying to guess how good an opponent will be this season based off last.  In other words just take it with a grain of salt and realize I was just kind of looking for a general idea.

Adrian

Nov. 16  vs Otterbein* @ Wooster
Nov. 17  @  Wooster* or vs Carnegie-Mellon*
Nov. 20  @  Sienna Heights
Nov. 24  @  Marygrove
Nov. 26  Michigan-Dearborn
Nov. 28  Mt. Union*
Dec.  1   @ Carnegie-Mellon*
Dec. 17  Northwestern Ohio
Dec. 22  @ Lawrence Tech
Dec. 29  vs Mt. Union* @ Defiance
Dec. 30  @ Defiance* or vs Finlandia*
* denotes in-region games

Best opponents and why:  @ Wooster, the Fighting Scots figure to be one of, if not the favorite in the NCAC and will once again be among the strongest programs within the Great Lakes Region.   If that game doesn't take place its probably @ Defiance.  I have Defiance in a group of teams right in the middle of the HCAC fighting for playoff spots, and if that game doesn't take place it would be Mt. Union, a middle of the OAC team.  Its a pretty big step down from Wooster to the next toughest.

Worst opponent and why:  Lawrence Tech is resurrecting its basketball program after nearly 40 years on the shelf.  The Southfield, MI school will be a very young and inexperienced squad.

Adrian has the added bonus of potentially playing Cargenie-Mellon and Mt. Union twice each.  This is never ideal but at least these games are in-region.


Overall impression:  For a team with some designs on winning an MIAA Championship this is a very weak schedule.  None of the D3 squads on the schedule will be challenging for their league's respective titles other than Wooster.  In fact I think its more likely than not that Otterbein and Carnegie will be at or near the bottom of their leagues and Finlandia will be Finlandia, not very good.  Three of their 4 NAIA opponents finished at the bottom of the WHAC and Lawrence Tech is in its first year and will most likely finish at the bottom of the WHAC.

The biggest positive is Adrian landing 6 in-region games and more importantly not just 6 games but potentially 5 winnable in-region games.  This will benefit not only Adrian but also the MIAA reps come NCAA time.

On my scale of 100, the best possible schedule score is 48.1, lowest 41.8
Last year by comparison:  58

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Long Time No Bloggy

So you may have noticed I haven't had much to write about in quite some time.  Back when I got this grand idea and laid down my ground rules I mentioned the possibility of an iceberg getting in the way, or a 'lifeberg' maybe.  Well it turns out that iceberg is really about 1,000 little ones instead of one big one like I was expecting, although I'm still wary of the big one.  Just sitting down to find something to write was pretty difficult for awhile and as the calender slowly drifted further and further away from last March my focus turned to other things.  I've been pretty deep into baseball this summer for the first time in awhile I guess, combine that with my usual fall dance with football and its just been hard to think of a reason to write about basketball.  Without getting to philosophical I suppose its good to close that book and set it on the shelf for awhile.

Grand Designs

 

I'm sure I had much bigger ideas and plans for this than what the reality is going to be.  Its easy to think of great things to do, much less easy to find the time to do them.   First of all, I'm a pure amateur at this blogging thing.  I had intended to spend a little time this summer getting to know this format and prettying up the place but like basketball it took a back seat to my desire to enjoy  summer. 

The reality is I've scaled back my expectations for what I'm going to be able to do with this, and you probably should as well.  That is if you had any expectations at all.  I'm already pretty certain its going to be difficult to see many games this year.  Last year I kind of went out of my way to see some games I probably shouldn't have and it will be doubly hard to get away this year.  First hand observations might be few and far between.

Those Thousand Icebergs, or getting personal

 

I'm one worn out dude.   Between a back injury that refuses to heal, a sleep disorder that continues to be disorderly, a brother's divorce, his desire to not take care of himself and a mother who I am sadly watching slowly fade from her former self, its been a pretty rough five years.   To say these things don't contribute to my mood and desires to do this blog would be a flat out lie.  Its been stressful,  exhausting and sometimes exasperating.  Believe it when I say the thought of just completely walking away from watching Hope basketball this year has crossed my mind more than once.  But, I know myself better than that and I really think that's something I couldn't do, especially as the season drew closer.  I think I probably need this escape.

(Without getting too personal if you are so inclined to pray for my brother he could use it, he's lived a much, much harder life than I have and is going through a hell I really can't even describe)

Between now and tip-off

Basketballs started hitting the hardwood this week which is either great or an eerie reminder of just how close we are to winter.  We have approximately 4 weeks until the games get real.  Over the next few days rosters will start filtering out and while it would be nice to take a comprehensive look at those I probably will not do that or will reserve my thoughts to the d3hoops message boards.  I would though like to take a closer look at the schedules.  When that happens or how in-depth I'll choose to get is still up in the air.

Holding On for now.

Some Clarity on the tournament

D3 released its proposal for next years tournament format which needed to be altered to accommodate moving the Championship game to Atlanta for the NCAA's 75th anniversary celebration.

Selection Day   Monday, Feb. 25
First Round       Saturday, March 2---on campus
Second Round  Saturday, March 9---on campus
Sweet 16           Saturday, March 16---on campus
Elite 8               Friday, March 22---Salem, Va.
Semi-finals       Saturday, March 23--Salem, Va.
Final                 Sunday, April 7---Phillips Arena, Atlanta, Ga.

This is pending approval by another committee of Presidents in August.  I would expect this gets approval, unless the Presidents pull out their calculators and decide it costs more to do it this way than some other way.  Here's the NCAA's article on how they arrived at the above:  Tournament Format

There wasn't any way to do this that was going to make everyone happy. There are about a million details still to be worked out, but at least we have something.

As for how I feel about this:  Cripes this is a long tournament.  Six weeks and if your team isn't involved beyond Salem or maybe even earlier its going to be tough to stay interested into April.  We aren't helped by the fact next year's calender pushes the D1 tournament back a weekend.  It ended on April 2 this past season.  We were actually looking at conducting the entire D3 tournament before the D1 tournament even started in 2013 and I'm not sure that had ever happened.

I welcome the increase in on campus games.  I've always advocated for this as its an incredible experience for the host school and its fans.  This format doubles the number of host schools in round one vs the 'pod' format which keeps that number at 14 plus the 4 hosts of the brackets with byes.

The biggest change will be the eight teams in Salem, which I suppose is a good thing.  However my personal fear is the reality of having to fly what will probably be 4 or more teams to Salem will cause the tournament committee to have to be less creative in their pairings.  Like for instance this past season Virginia Wesleyan was paired in a group that sent them to UW-Whitewater for the sweet 16.  That might not happen next year.

Overall its about as good as could be expected, like I said there was no way to do this that would make everyone happy and ultimately this is probably the least disruptive to the most student athletes.

Checking in on the neighbors: CCIW

My final neighbor check takes us to the CCIW, one of the top four conferences in D3 year in and year out.  Last season the experts on the d3hoops.com boards moaned all season about how the conference was down.  All season long in the piles of data I like to pour over I could see the top 3 or 4 teams in the league were as good as anybody so it really wasn't all that surprising to see them do well in the big tournament.  All they did was send 3 teams to the Sweet 16 and their 3rd place team ended up in the Final Four.   The CCIW doesn't have down years like everyone else.

There's little doubt at the moment the league isn't quite as mouth watering competitive as it had been for most of the last decade.  Right now there's a couple pretty heavy anchors weighing things down at the bottom and the days of anyone can beat anyone have been replaced by any of the top 4 can beat anyone.  Never the less in my time of following D3, every CCIW team save for North Park has won the league and every CCIW team has participated in the big dance, even Millikin (to be honest though Millikin and North Park have done pretty much nothing since the first couple years I began following this division).  I would be hard pressed to find another conference like that in the same time frame of just about 25 years.

Four of the past five seasons the CCIW has had a team in the NCAA Quarterfinals and 8 of 12 NCAA qualifiers have advanced to the Sweet 16, no small feats coming out of the Midwest Region.  Four different CCIW programs have won at least a share of the last four league Championships.  North Central has won the last two in almost identical fashion by running through the CCIW in impressive fashion after an injury filled non-conference schedule. One last little nugget to drive the point home, 6 of the 8 league schools have participated in the NCAA tournament the last 4 seasons.  This is a great league to follow.

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Checking in on the neighbors: HCAC

The Heartland Conference is one of the great mysteries of D3 basketball to me.  Situated in the basketball crazy state of Indiana and yet so little tournament or national recognition.  Over the course of the last dozen plus years the HCAC has evolved from the remnants of the old ICAC with additions of independents and members of long forgotten conferences.  Most recently Earlham left the NCAC to return to its Indiana roots.  Today its 10 teams stretch from Lexington, KY through western Ohio and much of Indiana.

Like most larger conferences they spend a great deal of time beating each other up.  Over the past 8 seasons, 6 different programs have won the league championship with Transylvania the only program to capture more than one.  Six different teams have made the NCAA tournament in the last 3 seasons alone, that's over half of the conference.  Tournament success for the league has been elusive with no trips beyond the second round since 2006.  Until this past season that was also the last time an HCAC team was awarded a home game in the tournament.  This league catches few breaks in the pairings department where they have often found themselves paired with the CCIW, MIAA and NCAC Champions and mostly on the road.

Last season Transylvania kind of ran away from everyone else and won the league by 4 full games as Hanover faltered in the seasons final stretch of games.  Rose-Hulman won the tournament and along with Transylvania received NCAA bids.  Both teams lost in the first round, RH to North Central and Transylvania was upset at home by Carroll.

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Checking in on the neighbors: PAC, with special guests

Calling the Presidents Athletic Conference the neighbors of anyone in the MIAA is kind of like saying Iowa is our neighbor.  If it wasn't for Lake Michigan many D3 schools in Iowa would actually be closer.  But being that the PAC is in the Great Lakes Region requires a look at whats going on.  What's going on is the PAC has been expanding lately adding St. Vincent, Geneva for both genders and  Chatham on the women's side.  Which means the PAC is now bigger than the MIAA, 9 men's programs, 10 women's programs.

For basketball there isn't much comparison, while the MIAA's NCAA basketball success largely lies in Holland and Grand Rapids the PAC has no such programs.  Bethany has been to the dance the most in recent years, but usually the PAC's rep is bounced in the first round and usually by double-digits.  I can't recall the last PAC school to win an NCAA game.  Unfortunately the PAC archives are woefully out of date, like by 7 years. 

Bonus trivia:   Eastern Michigan (or what would become EMU) and Wayne State were once members of the President's Athletic Conference.  This makes EMU the only school that can claim they were once in the MIAA and PAC.  Feel free to break that out at cocktail parties.

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Checking in on the neighbors: OAC

Until Marietta's championship a year ago the OAC Championship had mostly been in John Carroll's hands with Capital taking a title or two along the way.  Over the last half decade and more these have been the most consistently successful programs in the league so it seems fitting they should tie for the 2012 title.  It was quite a season, one of parity and surprise upsets as neither JCU or Capital could avoid a loss to a bottom half team.  A number of teams will feel they had legitimate chances to win the league, where just 8 games separated 1st from 10th.  Parity ruled this league.

Incredibly half, yes half, of the OAC conference games this year were decided by less than 10 point margins, including 9 overtime games.  Within the conference, this was as competitive of a league as you can probably find.  The problem though is that the league really didn't do much outside the confines of its borders.  Its always felt like this league should be better, should have a bigger presence on the D3 scene but for the most part they've fallen short of that level. 


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