Scheduling Idea for 14 Teams
When announcing the schedule for the 2018 and 2019 seasons, the conference's web release proclaimed, apparently proud of itself, that "Every [team will] play against every other team in the conference at least once during a four-year period."
This is inane.
What if I told you that delay could be cut down to the point where you play every team in the conference twice every three years? The catch I'll put right up front: except for your designated rival, whom you play every year, you only get any other team twice every three years.
Caveat: I've done a quick search both on mgoblog and the rest of the web to see if anybody else has had this idea. I haven't found it elsewhere. If you came up with it first, claim credit!
Here's how it works: a 14-team conference can easily be split into you, your rival, and twelve other teams. Those "twelve others" can be broken down into three per-school pods of four each. In any given year, you play two of your pods.
Here's a sample of how the conference might be broken down:
Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get the grid lines to show, but corresponding to this particular arrangement, we get the resulting schedule of opponents:
A couple notes:
- Each school and its rival play the same teams in any given year. Additionally, teams are paired up rival and rival, so that home/away sorts itself out fairly naturally. Unfortunately for perfect comparison purposes, although Michigan and Ohio State (say) have the same opponents, Michigan will e.g. play Iowa at home and Nebraska on the road while Ohio State gets Nebraska at home but has to travel to Iowa. I did not go through and work out what the whole home/away schedule would be, but the process should be fairly straightforward (if annoying) unless I've missed some crucial detail.
- The rivalry games are the 9th game on each team's schedule and naturally will alternate home and away.
- I set up this particular set of pods with the goal of making sure Michigan's home schedule stays interesting and fairly balanced every year. Some other pairs of schools come off well also (Iowa/Nebraska get balanced schedules, while Indiana/Purdue and Illinois/Northwestern are no worse off than they have to be) but others are unbalanced year to year based on current expectations (Penn State/MSU and Minnesota/Wisconsin get easy-hard-balanced, while Rutgers/Maryland get killer-balanced-balanced). I've played around with the pairings a bit to try to fix this and this was the best I could come up with.
Thanks for taking the time. How would the conference championship work then? The only rival pair from different current divisions are IND/PUR. Would we just keep them the same... what about tie breakers?
The goal, which I don't think I stated explicitly, is basically to get the next best thing to a round-robin. So for the conference championship you'd have the usual tie-breakers, perhaps: best conference record -> head-to-head result -> record vs. common opponents -> overall record -> point differential -> whatever.
I favor ditching the divisions (certainly) and the championship game, though I recognize that last makes this plan completely unrealistic in the money + eyeballs computation of college football.
understand it as the best attempt at a round-robin. Financially and regards to getting into College Championship series my guess is you have to keep the Conference Championship game... therefor with the current rules that state you have to have divisions to hold one (the ACC was attempting to have that barrier removed but failed) we would be obligated to keep divisions in some manner in my opinion.
Additionally, with our current Media Right contract likely to be up in 6 years and the end game as likely as not to be to add a couple more teams (if not 4) ie. Georgia Tech and North Carolina 1st then/or with Notre Dame and Virginia then others have suggested a pod system or else we will have 2 divsions of 9.... so may not want to change the system just to have to change it again if this comes to fruition.
North-East
Michigan (2)
OSU (4)
Penn State (10)
Michigan State (20)
Maryland (41)
Virginia (42)
Rutgers (43)
Indiana
Purdue
South-West:
Notre Dame (1)
Nebraska (7)
Georgia Tech (22)
Wisconsin (30)
Minnesota (31)
North Carolina (34)
Iowa (40)
Northwestern
Illinois
( ) = all time winning percentage ranking
This is interesting and smart and well done, and I enjoyed reading it.
Truthfully, though, I prefer the current system. Protecting rivalries like this creates permanent schedule imbalances where some teams will have tougher schedules year after year than other teams. At the same time, by not using divisions to protect other rivalries, you get crappy situations like not seeing UM-MSU or OSU-PSU every season.
In my opinion, having 14 or 16 schools in a college football conference is too many to try to preserve strong bonds between all of the schools I'd much rather have 10 teams in the conference. But with a huge number like 14 or 16, I'm fine splitting the conference in two, building and preserving rivalries within the divisions, and then having the once-every-few-years game against the other side. That isn't as fun as it should be now because the recent additions were Rutgers and Maryland, but that's a different problem.
I question how playing STAEE only twice every three years would sell. But it would give Illinois more opportunity to play their hated rival than the current system allows.
MSU thing is a non starter in my opinion. Otherwise it's very interesting.
Please find a sane AND fair schedule for the 14 teams in Basketball. Way to easy to get schedule inequities.
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Does this work out for which games are home and which are away?
I would imagine this would actually be a six year cycle.
Over three years, each team you play twice you play once at home and once on the road.
The best way to do that in a large conference with no divisions (and avoiding repeat games) would be take the regular season champion, playing against the top congference team they did NOT play in the regular season, or at least the top-placing team they did not beat.
[Somewhere in there, there should be allowances giving preference to regulation time and road wins/losses, over overtime and home wins/losses, perhaps as tiebreakers]
yeah, it's well thought out but the truth is the real solution is a 9-10 team conference with round robin. I can without hesitation think of 4-5 teams to 'uninvite'
I am convinced that for football, 8 is the ideal for a conference- that leaves enough other slots for a combination of two or three P-5 opponents and a couple of others.
9 teams means an 8-game round robin; 8 games allows a couple "warm-up"/regional games against local teams from the de facto "lower" G5 conferences as well as a couple OOC P5 teams. 10 or 11 teams is really too many: 9 conference games is inherently imbalanced and I don't much care for it; 10 games would give no wiggle room in OOC scheduling. In any given year you're either lowering playoff/BCS chances by playing P5 teams and risking likely losses... or you're reducing your playoff/BCS resume by *not* playing P5 teams.
If I picked 9 from the current conference, I'd cut it down to Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, OSU, Wisconsin. Other selections might be satisfactory.
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But if we're attempting to answer the question, "How do you best schedule 9 games for 14 teams?", the situation is really so kind of ridiculous that you're going to have to make compromises. The current vogue is for divisions, but I prefer to approximate a conference round-robin, and this post was about how to make that work.
The essential problem is that in any given year every team will "miss" 4 conference opponents. This is a small enough number to rotate not less frequently than every other year: the question is how to accomplish that. The scheme in my OP rotates all but one opponent, but other schemes could be devised. For instance:
A. "NFL-Style"
A team's schedule consists of (a) permanent (historical (Mich-OSU), geographical (Iowa-Neb), or conference-artificial (MSU-PSU)) rivalry, (b) the four teams not played the previous year, (c) four remaining "most similar" teams from the previous season.
Pros: should give every team a plausibly competitive schedule each season; follows familiar reasoning from the professional league; for Michigan, liable to protect games with historical rivals (e.g. MSU, PSU) other than Ohio State as they're these days usually pretty good teams.
Cons: schedules won't be balanced (Purdue is liable to end up with easier schedule that Nebraska, e.g.); risks missing rivalries if teams have very different seasons; scheduling is kind of a pain; schedule is not entirely predictable year to year.
B, Several Protected Games
A team's schedule consists of some (e.g. five) teams played every year and other (e.g. four) teams on a rotating basis. Michigan might play e.g. OSU, MSU, PSU, Minnesota, and Wisconsin every year and the other teams rotate. Similar to divisions, but (a) each team's five don't completely overlap (e.g. Minnesota might play MSU, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska) and (b) there are no divisions. The con is mostly that the groups are a nuisance of a combinatorial problem to work out with overlapping vs. non-overlapping opponents. Also the schedules won't be perfectly balanced.
Other schemes could probably worked out as well.
only playing one other division opponent and six from the other side. I'd think it would be fairer to have schools all play the same number from their divisions. Perhaps you could adjust that, but it would still be an issue with IND/PUR being protected unless the NCAA allows championship games without divisions.
It's an interesting idea. I've gotten used to not seeing the western divisions schools very often and I'm OK with that. Not sure if I'd like this better or not.
"I'd think it would be fairer to have schools all play the same number from their divisions."
I believe that is largely the point of his plan: to scrap the divisions.
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Limit the conferences to 10 teams (per conference), period, thusly playing 9 conference and 3 non conference games per year in a perfect setting but NO!
The NCAA is a sorry bunch of pollyannas and it's 100% under the control of the SEC.
is to rotate evenly 12 teams between home only, away only, and home and away for every 3 years and then install a permanent two play rival for each team in the conference. that would equal 18 games every year
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