I started looking at 2024 fall schedules. One jumped out at me. If you think your school is playing a difficult schedule, I suggest you compare Denver's schedule. Six away games to start the season, Cal, Stanford, Wash, SMU, Creighton and UCLA. Wow. then, they host 3 pretty good programs: Yale, Portland and Seattle - before beginning their summit conference schedule. With only 5 conference participants, Denver is looking for a high RPI with a killer SoS. Credit for loading up a difficult schedule.
I have all the known schedules up and running at https://rpiupdatemenssoccer.blogspot.com. Lots of new bells and whistles on the website.
nice. Any chance for a future enhancement to have a calendar for all future matches? This feature could be useful to see any matches available in an area (while traveling). Thanks for everything that you do.
Well, Denver's only very close opponent is Air Force (an hour or so) south. Creighton and Omaha are 8 hours away. Utah Tech 9-10 hrs? New Mexico and BYU - oh never mind. Tulsa 10 hours? So, Denver is going to be flying to most matches. The only east coast travel is to Pittsburgh.
Because they don't have to play anyone the rest of their year and most likely will win their conference. The 8 games against Summit opponents will probably drag their overall SOS down but will get credit for the OOC Strength of Schedule. Denver is also on quarters so they used the first part of the season to tour the country before school starts. In such a weak conference it really is the only way to get an at-large should something go wrong in the tournament. Does the Summit get a waiver for only 5 teams this year?
The Summit is a strange (and for soccer, shrinking) league. I didn't realize Western Illinois was moving on. Anyone know where WIU is headed?
Thanks. Better, I guess -- at least a few of those schools are in WIU's neighborhood. At some point not too far away the conferences will surely have to be more regionally compact for the non-football sports (or at least non-revenue). the travel budgets for Incarnate Word and Houston Christian and Liberty have to be completely out of whack for those schools.
Got the BC schedule, out for a few hours. 15 Matches? I can't ever remember so few. Would I be correct in thinking that there will be an add-on (or two) sometime during the season? https://bceagles.com/news/2024/7/11/mens-soccer-announces-2024-schedule.aspx
All of August has been uploaded. I will slowly get the rest of the calendar linked up over the next week.
Truthfully, I have nothing to do with Denver U --- although I lived in Denver in 1967 - but my world ended at the fence around our yard.... Denver is undefeated in their first 8 matches (4-0-4) against a buzz saw of competitive opponents beating Cal, Stanford, Creighton and Yale (ok, not the same level) and drew Washington, SMU, UCLA and Portland) with only Seattle remaining before the Summit Conference matches start with Pittsburgh visit thrown in the middle of it. I have to give Jaime a lot of credit for scheduling a rough out-of-conference schedule and then executing it.