cpthomas, as others have already mentioned, the hubbub about conferences expanding is driven by football money. The Big10 has ambitions to grow and the allure of the Big10 football money brings to the programs. It has been mentioned that that the Big10 football money is shared equally among member schools and each school raked in $22 MM. No wonder Missouri and Kansas are interested. As a fan of a Pac10 school, I doubt that the Pac will just sit idly by while all this frenzy is going on. Just like in the corporate world, a wave of mergers and acquisitions will compel others in the same industry to do the same, or be acquired themselves. I don’t think the Pac can survive if the LA schools defect to another conference, as an example. While a 13th game [conference championship] is appealing, the football money is bankrolled by TV contract. TV $$$ is driven by eyeballs, so it would be nice to see the TV markets in this particular geographical area [link]: Rank Designated Market Area (DMA) TV Households % of US 2 Los Angeles, CA 5,659,170 4.927 5 Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX 2,544,410 2.215 6 San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA 2,503,400 2.179 10 Houston, TX 2,123,460 1.849 12 Phoenix, AZ 1,873,930 1.631 13 Seattle-Tacoma, WA 1,833,990 1.597 16 Denver, CO 1,539,380 1.340 22 Portland, OR 1,188,770 1.035 28 San Diego, CA 1,073,390 0.934 31 Salt Lake City, UT 944,060 0.822 42 Las Vegas, NV 721,780 0.628 44 Albuquerque-Santa Fe, NM 694,040 0.604 66 Tucson (Sierra Vista), AZ 465,100 0.405 Bringing in Utah will bring in the SLC market. Adding BYU will bring no additional benefit to the Pac, since you already have Utah in that TV market. Academically, Utah will be palatable since it is a research institution, while BYU is not. Adding Colorado will bring in the Denver TV market, and Colorado and Utah will be the designated travel partners for sports such as soccer and basketball. Personally, I can’t see why bringing in the 16th- and 31st-largest TV markets will be of benefit to the Pac. I obviously don’t have access to the financials, but just looking at it from a simplistic sense, you’ll now be splitting the pie to 12 slices from the previous 10, so you’re looking at expanding the pie by at least 20% to break even, otherwise, why expand in the first place? The problem that I see is that I don’t see any network paying the Pac12 an extra 20% for TV rights just because Utah and Colorado were added to the conference. Those 2 institutions are not plum enough to pay the Pac an extra 20% for their TV rights. Which goes back as to why are conferences looking to expand, or specifically, why would Big12 institutions want to leave the fold? There are 22 million reasons why, and that the Big12 contract, unlike the Big10, is not shared equally, with Texas getting the lion’s share. That’s why the Big12 is right for the picking, as disgruntled institutions look for a better pot of gold. Texas has been mentioned as a possible addition to the Pac, the Dallas TV market is huge and tempting. But Oklahoma and TAMU will have something to say about Texas moving anywhere without them being a part of it. While the Pac may want Texas, why would Texas want to be with the Pac? In the end, it will probably be Colorado and Utah. But from a financial perspective I just don’t see how those two can increase the whole football TV contract by at least 20% for all the Pac members to vote them in in the first place.
According to this guy, the big pressure in the West for expansion isn't in the Pac10, but in the Mountain West, and very soon. http://blogs.mercurynews.com/colleg...g-the-pac-10-wcc-and-wac-meetings/#more-13633 BCS, baby..
And here's what the local rag is saying: http://blog.oregonlive.com/pac10/2010/06/report_pacific-10_big_12_confe.html
Looks like the Big 12 is imploding with Missouri/Nebraska possibly heading to the Big 10 and the potential for 6 teams heading to the Pac10. Also sounds like serious turmoil at their conference meetings going on right now.
The other piece to remember is that the folks who are willing to leak stuff may not be all that close to the decision making. No group is less able to prevent leaks than University CEO's when they're working on sensitive issues.
If the Pac 10 adds A&M, Texas, and Oklahoma State to its league, you would have to think the new Pac 16 would be by far the best soccer conference in the country. You would have elite programs like Stanford, UCLA, and Texas A&M, along with Top 25 programs in USC, Texas, Oklahoma State, and Cal. That's a pretty brutal schedule for the conference and the RPI would be off the charts for seeding purposes in the NCAA tourney.
Will it? If the 16 teams all play each other, that leaves only 5 out of conference games for their RPI's to correlate with the rest of the NCAA. That would probably mean no linkage across the country, and half of the "PAC16" would have miserable in conference records. Even now, linkage is pretty marginal. Maybe cpcthomas could give us a better idea about the ramifications, but I'm not convinced the great benefits to conference RPI are there.
I doubt they would all play each other. Like in football they would probably split into two "divisions". If 16 schools, conference teams would play all 7 of their "division" opponents and then maybe a couple of "cross-divisional" opponents. Still plenty of non-conference opportunities available.
I live in San Diego. I go to matches at San Diego State usually. Different thread, I know, but it looks like this could have a bearing on Pac-10 men's soccer or no? Doesn't sound like the Mountain West is part of this whole thing at all (that's where our women play).
If that's the case, the PAC10 already plays a couple of games each year with the Big 12. The article I cited mentions AZ and AZ St playing the Big 12 schools. how would that help their RPI? And what does that do to the RPI of the remaining PAC10 school? That starts to look like two 8 team conferences to me.Unless it works for all the members, I don't see what the great advantage is. It works for Football because of the money. How does it work for soccer? The top PAC10 schools already are at the top of the RPI charts, so it's the middle of the conference that would be affected, and I just don't see an automatic gain for them.
Agreed and good questions. I doubt anyone thinks any of the potential realignments has anything to do with soccer? It's all about the other "football" and all the other sports are just along for the ride - although except for men's basketball, football subsidizes just about every other sport. Regarding the RPI questions, if both the B10 and Pac10 go to 16 teams and the Big 12 disappears, the schools for the tournament still have to come from somewhere don't they? As it is right now Pac10 teams with .500 conference records (and below .500 in a few cases) get invites. Same with ACC. And if we check out who ends up making the Sweet 16 it's those two conferences (was it 10 of 16 last year?).
It's possible the Pac 10, with 16 schools, would do what the Big East does: Have two divisions, each of which plays a round robin, with rotating 4-game schedules against teams from the other division. That would leave 8 games to be played against non-conference opponents. It also would require an end-of-season tournament to determine conference champion. Among other things, it would reduce the number of possible non-conference games for Pac 10 teams from 11 to 8. And it would reduce the number for the new Pac 10 members (from the Big 12) from 10 to 8 (am I remembering correctly that they only hve 11 teams playing women's soccer). It's too hard for me to figure how this would affect their RPIs. But for teams not from the new Pac 10, it would mean less opportunity to play the top Pac 10 schools. It might make it harder for those teams to get the kinds of opposition they need to beef up their RPIs. Also, when looking at the NCAA's other criteria and their secondary criteria, the change might help the Pac 10 schools and hurt the non-conference teams that ordinarily play top Pac 10/Big 12 schools due to a reduced opportunity to get wins against top opponents.
But if you play fewer games with outside teams, how do you get RPI linkage to determine that you are, in fact, playing the best? It's the reverse question from what could happen if the SWAC just played within conference.
Maybe someone knows (I sure don't) but how big of a non-conference sampling do you need? If there are now 16 teams and they all play 8 non-conference games that's a 128 game sampling. IMO, the RPI is a nice tool, but hardly gospel. If it was then we would all know who the at-large teams were before the tournament selection even occurred. I also doubt regional/metropolitan non-conference match ups like UP vs UW, Stanford/Cal vs. SCU, etc... would go away. If anything some of the "lighter" opponents would probably get dropped.
Pac 10 expansion ???? http://www.freep.com/article/201006...s06/Report-Pac-10-to-offer-six-Big-12-schools
As I understand it, even now the average contender plates only 3 games out of region. The entire ACC only played 6 games or so with the pac10 on the other side of country. 6 games! that's about the same linkage that Portland alone had with the PAC10 That's not any linkage at all, compared to the total ACC schedule. I'm sure the PAC10 is similar going the other direction with conferences in the East. Linkage is almost non existent. If you cut back any more, I don't see how you could make any comparisons at all across the country. And RPI is very important, if you look at the last few years. The selections and seedings have gone lockstep with the RPI with only one or two exceptions. Not having linkage with the rest of the country could backfire on the conference.
Now that I think about it some more, you're correct about the effect of reduced RPI linkage for the hypothetical 16 Pac 10 teams. To illustrate, a 16-team conference that played only conference games would have a normal distribution of teams in terms of the RPI. Some would be high on the RPI list, some in the middle, and some near the bottom. The effect of non-conference games, from the perspective of a strong conference, is to counteract this effect. The conference's teams use the non-conference games to bolster their records. These bolstered records, particularly if the non-conference games are against teams with good records, then push the teams higher in the RPI rankings. This is what allowed the ACC and Pac 10 last year, for example, to get a high proportion of their teams into the NCAA Tournament. Within the new hypothetical Pac 10 alignment, if its teams were to play 12 games within the conference, the teams would need to think hard about how to schedule their non-conference games. Do they want to schedule to assure a really good non-conference win/loss record? Do they want to take some chances with their non-conference win/loss record in order to improve their strength of schedule? Do teams likely to finish below 0.500 in the conference need to be careful to schedule some sure wins in order to be sure they have a record of at least 0.500 (which is required to get into the Tournament and which appears to be what Duke did last year)? There are no obvious answers to these questions, but they're all things a team would have to think about. I do agree with the person who said this probably would not affect other top teams' abilities to schedule non-conference games against the top Pac 10 teams.
CW also is correct about inter-regional problems. To start with, the RPI has inter-conference problems, as suggested in my previous post. The NCAA actually knows this, which is why it uses a Non-Conference RPI in addition to the regular RPI. The NCRPI, however, has problems because it is based on a small data set. The RPI's current inter-regional problems are even greater due to the lack of inter-regional games. The West Region plays the least number of inter-regional games. And, if I recall correctly, it plays more inter-regional games against the Central Region than any other. The hypothetical expanded Pac 10 presumably would increase the number of West-Central games, but decrease the West's number of games against other regions. This would make the inter-regional problems, overall, even worse. To counteract this, the expanded Pac 10 in theory could schedule more of its non-conference games against teams from outside the West and Central regions. This, however, could have serious budget implications that might make it impossible to do.
For the ACC, however, it's easier to play out-of-region games. The reason for this is strictly geographic. It's a shorter distance for most of the ACC teams to the other regions than it is for the Pac 10. This is why you find the West Region having the lowest proportion of out-of-region games.
Absolutely, if the ACC went to 16 teams AND placed even fewer teams out of conference AND out of region. Last year, for instance, there were 5 teams competing for a 1 seed. Two were UNC and Portland. The only linkage they had was TAMU and Miami, and they each split those teams. Without those games and linkage, the 1 seed might have gone the other way - Who knows? The seeding is arbitrary enough already. UNCs win over Out of conference and out of region TAMU saved their #1 seed.
To add to the discussion, for the 2009 season I did a study to determine teams' true "playing pools", in order to determine the numbers of games teams from each pool played against teams from other pools. I concluded that there actually are five playing pools: Central, Middle, Northeast, Southeast, and West. (It would be better to call "Central" Southwest.) Of these pools, here are the percentages of games they played inside and outside their pools: Central: Inside 77.6%, Outside 22.4% Middle: 75.8%-24.2% Northeast: 85.3%-14.7% Southeast: 77.4%-22.6% West: 80.4%-19.6% The Northeast region (91 teams) included the Big East teams. The region played 1.5% of its non-region games against the Central region, 5.0% against the Middle region, 5.6% against the Southeast region, and 2.7% against the West region. It thus appears to have very little linkage at all to the West and Central regions. The West region (53 teams) played 7.0% of its games against the Central region, 5.2% against the Middle region, 4.5% against the Northeast region, and 2.9% against the Southeast region. It is not possible to know whether the six Big 12 teams would shift their predominant playing pools from the Central to the West region. In either event, however, the reorganization likely would increase inter-regional play between the West and Central regions and diminish West region play against the other regions.
I was thinking about what a 16 team conference would do to UW's non conference season. They always play Portland because we are the closest team, and I doubt that would change. The teams also play each other's tournaments for the same reason, which gives an additional 4 games linkage. With a 15 game conference season, they would have a minimum 5 game linkage with Portland, and only a 4 game linkage with the rest of the NCAA. Their linkage to Portland could go as high as 10 games if Portland scheduled other Pac 10 teams, which geography dictates would probably happen.
Here's a followup on the PAC10 story from the Big12 side. http://blog.oregonlive.com/pac10/2010/06/big_12_leaders_cancel_news_con.html It's getting interesting....
Sounds like this happened rather quickly,,,, hurry up and wait. The B10 rumors and "talks" have been going on for months. My assessment is that the B10 was kind of looking for the pick of the litter from 2/3 conferences. Maybe the P10 had a knee jerk reaction recently when the B10 heated up and they didn't want to be the only one standing when the music stops. Way too much activity for something not to happen ...... my 2 cents.