Ending an entire week before selection Sunday is really weird and also playing conference games in Dec. Apparently teams can schedule non-conference games after the B1G tournament. Risky move to potentially lose a meaningless game right before selections are made.
2018 B1G tournament in NYC a week early!
- Thread starter Kly
- Start date
I didn't like playing the last game of the regular season but I also don't like having a week and a half plus til our first tourney game.
Don't know about the effect. It's interesting in that when the BTT started, many (including me) thought it would be a good thing for the conference, and there certainly have been positives. However, Michigan State (2000) is the only NCAA champion from the Big Ten in the era of the BTT.
Maybe the rest will do some good.
Who we going to play in the week between the BTT and the NCAAs? Some division II school? You can't schedule any D1 team that's in a conference that has a tournament that week, because you can't know in advance what team will be playing (or not playing) and on which day/date. This really seems like whoring the entire B1G just to get a BTT slot in MSG in NYC.
Yes. I don't like this at all. I don't think it's worth the trade off to go so early, although the BTT will get a lot of attention that weekend. I would think that scheduling a couple moderate tests at home would make sense that last week.
I don't know what next year's conf tourney schedules look like, but this year the West Coast Conf & Miss Valley Conf both finish before the B1G tournament starts. If moving the B1G tourney up a week next year means it is in line with those conferences, I think you could potentially try to schedule a game against any of these teams: Gonzaga, St Mary's, BYU, Wichita St, and N Iowa.
WCC tourney is Fri/Sat/Mon/Tues, so it doesn't finish a full week early, and it's unlikely we'd get any decent WCC team (e.g., a Gonzaga that will believe it will be playing on Tuesday for a conference championship) to fly cross-country for a game in WL later that week against a top team that could potentially destroy it's seeding a few days later. Would we fly cross-country to get a shot at them? Maybe...if they had the guts to take on a P5 team at that point of their season.
Might have a better chance of getting a Missouri Valley Conf team, since their tournament ends on Sunday, like ours, and they'd be more regional to WL for travel purposes. We'd be wise to be looking to lock in one of those games NOW, since every B1G team expecting to be playing in the 2018 NCAAs will be in the same boat, and there's only so many available teams to consider.
The Big Ten Tournament gets a lot of attention regardless. The only reason it was changed because the Big Ten was set on going to NYC and the other venues are booked. It's dumb and aside from the week+ of no games after the tournament, we will also be playing even more of the Big Ten schedule in December (when students are off-campus) and I'm assuming we will have to cram in more non-conference games into shorter time spans as well.
It's just dumb.
Gonzaga probably would require a home and home agreement, I assume. I am thinking that a school like Gonzaga would welcome the test after playing a soft conference schedule, On the other hand, I could see them wanting to schedule MSU for TV ratings reasons.
