WVU’s Outstanding 2020-21 Hoop Schedule an Exercise in Patience
November 03, 2020 04:00 PM | Men's Basketball, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Josh Eilert didn't want to answer his phone. He didn't even want to look at it.This was in September when the tremendous 2020-21 West Virginia basketball schedule he had a big hand in constructing was going up in flames.
The "Backyard Brawl" had to be extinguished, this year's game in Morgantown being tacked on to the back end of a recent two-year extension that was announced earlier this year.
That was one of four games immediately eliminated when the NCAA announced the regular-season starting date for men's and women's basketball was being pushed back to Nov. 25 to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Around the same time, Duke opted to pull out of the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament in the Bahamas when it was moved to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Blue Devils chose instead to host their own tournament on campus, which will now include Bellarmine, Elon and Howard.
Then, Purdue took a pass on the eight-team Basketball Hall of Fame Invitational that was originally slated to be played at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Sunday, Dec. 13 before it was moved to Mohegan Sun.
West Virginia was contracted to play the Boilermakers in a quadruple-header that also included games between Penn State and Florida, Stanford and Georgia Tech and Army and Princeton. However, it simply made no economic sense for these eight schools to travel to a neutral site to play games with no fans in the arena.
Eilert wondered which domino was going to fall next?
"You lost all of those contracted games," Eilert said recently. "The first priority was to figure out Pitt. We worked like crazy to get it in and it just didn't work. The reason we were playing it the second game of the year two years in a row wasn't coincidental. We'd rather play that game in December, but (mid-November) was the only time it worked out for both of us."
That series was negotiated at the athletics director level between West Virginia's Shane Lyons and Pitt's Heather Lyke.Basketball scheduling is much different than football in that schedules are done on a yearly basis instead of years in advance. It typically involves the operations director working with the head coach and the senior administrator (Steve Uryasz, in WVU's case), with the athletic director overseeing and signing the contracts once they are drafted.
"The only thing I get involved in is that they know I have a set of criteria in terms of what types of teams we are playing," Lyons explained.
Lyons' vision of what a basketball schedule should resemble matches perfectly the vision Bob Huggins has for his Mountaineer basketball schedules, which have consistently been among the most difficult in school history.
Pull out last year's men's basketball media guide and turn to page 189 where the games against AP-ranked teams are listed. One full column and nearly half of a second is taken up by teams that Huggins has faced since returning to his alma mater in 2008.
The other column and a half represents the entire history of West Virginia University men's basketball!
"I look at (basketball scheduling) in terms of different buckets," Lyons explained. "Including conference games, we've got to play some teams 1 through 50, 51 through 100 and so on. You want to make your buckets as equal as possible, but what you don't want to have happen is put too many games in the bottom buckets and you win a lot of games and your record looks good, but you don't get an at-large bid.
"So there is some strategy to it from a scheduling standpoint."
When games were being eliminated and teams around the country began scrambling to fill their 27-game regular season schedules, it looked like ESPN was going to come to the rescue by hosting multiple MTEs (multi-tournament events) in a secure bubble at its sports complex in Orlando, Florida.
Michigan State, Kentucky, Kansas and some other traditional power programs were counting on ESPN to help fill their schedules and give them some quality nonconference games needed to enhance their NET rankings. But ESPN abandoned its plans to host games in a secure bubble when certain health protocols couldn't be guaranteed.
West Virginia was tempted to explore the Orlando option as well, but opted to stick with the South Dakota event, which includes Texas A&M, Ohio State, Memphis, Creighton, Dayton and Wichita State.
South Dakota State has since replaced Utah, which pulled out of the tournament last week.
"I was pretty set on making sure we stayed put where we were in South Dakota, not knowing what was going to happen," Lyons said. "We did sign a contract and they did change the game, the sponsor and the location, but the field has remained pretty much the same. We had a lot of conversations with them about the field after Duke dropped out, and now Utah, but it's still a great field and that was important."
West Virginia was also protected by the two challenges the Big 12 Conference has established with the SEC and the Big East. The Mountaineers will play host to Florida on Saturday, Jan. 30, giving them a top-end Power 5 nonconference opponent.
West Virginia will have another appealing non-conference game once the Big East makes it known who the Mountaineers will be playing on Dec. 6.
That takes care of five of the nine games the Mountaineers needed to complete a full 27-game schedule, which also includes 18 Big 12 games. The Purdue opening was taken care of the day after the Boilermakers pulled out of the Basketball Hall of Fame Invitational when Eilert was able to land Richmond.
At first glance, the Purdue-Richmond tradeoff doesn't appear too appealing until you dig deeper into things. Purdue is coming off a 16-win season and a 32 NET ranking in 2020, which is just six spots higher than Richmond's 38 NET ranking.
The Spiders have their top six players returning from a team that won 24 games and was poised to make the NCAA Tournament last season (a seventh, guard Nick Sherod, injured his knee this fall and is out for the year).
"Sometimes, fans base their assumptions off of brand name as opposed to looking at the data," Lyons noted. "When you carry a Big Ten affiliation or something like that, people assume it's a better team, which is not always the case."
Eilert said many teams were fearful of scheduling Richmond, which is why the Spiders were still available.
"I got lucky on that one," he admitted. "They were in a position where they were so good, and their NET ranking was so good, that nobody wanted to play them."
Richmond will bus up to Morgantown to play the Mountaineers on Dec. 13.
When terms couldn't be worked out with either Bowling Green or Miami, Ohio of the Mid-American Conference, West Virginia was able to get Buffalo on board to play at the WVU Coliseum on Dec. 29.
Lyons admitted not being able to work out a game against either Bowling Green or Miami was disappointing because Ohio is so important to Huggins' recruiting, but that criteria was fulfilled when Youngstown State remained on the schedule to play here on Dec. 2.
Youngstown State and Robert Morris, of the Horizon League, were the two remaining puzzle pieces to be completed for the 2020-21 schedule.
"I thought we were scrambling and we ended up being one of the better ones out there," Eilert said. "I'm listening to all of these other ops guys losing their minds and I'm thinking to myself, 'Well, we might not be nearly as bad as I thought.'"
Stadium insider Jeff Goodman recently polled some of college basketball's schedule makers and posted some of their anonymous responses on his Twitter feed. They were telling, at least the ones that were printable:
"Dentist chair, no Novocain."
"College basketball's non-golden window."
"Wild game of make believe."
"Operating under false pretense."
"Similar to playing go fish."
"Scheduling = hamster wheel."
And …
"Throwing darts at a board."
Eilert believes there will be many teams unable to complete a 27-game schedule this year.
"When the Orlando thing blew up those people are now sitting on their thumbs trying to figure out what they're doing," he said.
Eilert's bosses are certainly appreciative of the job he's done preserving a schedule to suit the basketball team West Virginia is expected to have this season."Josh did a great job of really saving the nonconference schedule for us," Huggins said last week. "Adding Richmond was really good for us. They're a heck of a team. They are a team a lot of people are picking to be a Sweet 16 team in the NCAA Tournament. I think adding them to our nonconference schedule really beefs it up. Of course, having Florida and somebody from the Big East helps as well.
"What's happened with the MTEs in Florida is everybody is really scrambling and thank goodness we're a little bit ahead of everybody else," Huggins added.
"You wish you had a couple of (exhibition) games before you go out to South Dakota, but no one has that so we're all in the same boat there," Lyons said. "I've been over to practice a couple of times and it looks like we have great talent this year.
"Obviously, we'll know once we start playing other teams, but I think this team can do some special things as we move forward, and it's really no different than what we're dealing with in football right now," he said. "We've got to stay healthy, the other teams have to stay healthy, and hopefully, we can get all of the games in."
Lyons, the man who helped preserve a 2020 college football season as chair of the NCAA Division I Football Committee, said he is confident a Big 12 tournament and NCAA Tournament will be played this year.
"I don't think we have another choice but to have those tournaments," he said. "It may or may not be in March - it might be in April or May - but those are the uncertainties that we are venturing into with this basketball season. I don't think the NCAA has any other option than to have a tournament, and what that's going to look like could be different this year."
As for Eilert, he'd just as soon keep his desk phone off the hook and his cell phone on mute, at least until January when West Virginia gets into the teeth of its Big 12 schedule.
"It was a three-month process and every time I turned one corner there was a new obstacle. It was really stressful. I didn't want to answer the phone," he concluded.
You Can Never Have Too Many Headlocks
Wednesday, April 01
Cam Cook | March 30
Tuesday, March 31
Coach Jay Boulware | March 30
Tuesday, March 31
Coach Rich Rodriguez | March 30
Tuesday, March 31
