Just minutes into his inaugural press conference as the incoming commissioner of the Big West Conference, Dan Butterly took determined aim at one of the conference’s biggest failings, its basketball scheduling.
It is a worthy target and historically stubborn challenge in a conference that ranked 24th among 32 NCAA Division I conferences for the last two seasons by some metrics and hasn’t had any of its members deemed worthy of an at-large selection to the NCAA Tournament in 14 years.
Only twice in those 14 years has a member advanced past a first-round game, UC Irvine in 2019 and Hawaii in 2016.
Butterly, who comes over from the Mountain West Conference after 21 years, isn’t the first Big West commissioner to identify and circle the lagging schedule issue.
But, then, the commissioner hasn’t been the problem. The membership usually has.
“It doesn’t help if you’ve got a team that’s ranked in the top 50, top 75, if the rest of the league is ranking 200 and below,” Butterly said.
Thus, what Butterly terms his “Three Musketeers analogy: ‘All for one and one for all,’ ” approach.
“What you’ve ultimately got to do is get the coaches to understand scheduling and boosting their NET rankings now, to be in a position once you get out of nonconference play (and) into conference play that you know you’re not lowering your best team’s NET ranking,” Butterly said.
The NET, an acronym for NCAA Evaluation Tool, replaces the old Ratings Percentage Index metric which the NCAA used for selection and seeding purposes. NET takes in game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capping at 10 points per game), and net offensive and defensive efficiency, according to the NCAA.
The more teams a conference gets into the NCAA Tournament and the more they advance, the more money the conference, as a whole and individually, receives from the NCAA. Teams earned $1.68 million for their conference over a six-year period for each game they played in the 2019 tournament.
But a united approach has traditionally been a tough sell to the nine schools that currently make up the conference (UC San Diego and Cal State Bakersfield will join July 1) and often have differing needs and philosophies.
For one thing, you have coaches whose No. 1 priority is keeping their job — or winning enough games to afford them an opportunity to move on to a more lucrative one and adopt a schedule that is conducive to those aims.
And, then, there are three schools that have football teams that can contribute to the athletic department revenues and six that have to put it all on the backs of basketball by often over-scheduling.
UH, which competes on the Football Bowl Subdivision level in the Mountain West, is part of the three, while UC Davis and Cal Poly are in the Football Championship Subdivision in the Big Sky Conference. For the other six, basketball is the biggest revenue driver, which means they often have to hit the road for beatings by Power Five schools in the nonconference portion of the season for the money the games bring in.
At Long Beach State, the administration has often used guarantee games as a way to underwrite the contract of Dan Monson, who has been the highest-paid coach in the conference. In 2018, according to a report by the student newspaper, the school took in $400,000 from five so-called “guarantee” games, $331,360 of which went to help pay part of the coach’s salary.
In the MWC, “We have really gone into a lot of the data and analytics, and looked at the philosophies of each program to determine where their program stands, how they should be scheduling. That is the model I’m looking at,” Butterly said.
“It isn’t easy,” Butterly acknowledged. “You’ve got to get the coaches to understand the philosophy and get their trust and help them to understand what you’re trying to do to improve.”
It is an ambitious goal and one calculated to test the new commissioner.
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NET RESULTS
NCAA NET Rankings of Big West men’s basketball teams for the 2019-20 season
Rank | School
114 | UC Irvine
177 | UC Santa Barbara
210 | UC Riverside
215 | Hawaii
218 | UC Davis
233 | CS Northridge
261 | CS Fullerton
306 | Long Beach State
323 | Cal Poly
The NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) ranking replaced the Ratings Percentage Index metric. NET is calculated using game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin (capping at 10 points per game), and net offensive and defensive efficiency, according to the NCAA.
Source: NCAA
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
