good for both schools…local schools should try to play each other. Six D1 schools in the Bay area should offer some good matchups, but P5 schools dictate the schedules. SCU,USF, SMC offer only a chance for a stumble for Cal and Stanford, which is probably why they don’t play often. I haven’t looked, but Stanford has seemed to schedule the most Bay area matchups over the past ten years or so. Hope the Broncs hammer the school near Oakland.
Conference schedule
Santa Clara
Home/Road: Gonzaga, LMU, Pacific, Portland, Saint Mary’s, San Diego, San Francisco
Home: BYU
Road: Pepperdine
So dumb. There’s never again going to be a year where BYU and SCU play twice, is there?
And we lose out by only playing Pepp away.
Just another reminder of how bending over backwards for Gonzaga doesn’t work out for anyone.
I still hate the off-balance schedule but will spare everyone my annual rant about it.
I am glad that SCU at least gets BYU at home this year. Traveling to Provo with no return for three straight years was absurd and frustrating. I’m not so mad about only playing Pepperdine once. The smart money has Pepp taking a big step back and LMU taking a big leap forward. One never knows if that will play out, but better at this point to be playing LMU twice.
I guess I’m kind of satisfied with this conference schedule based only on the fact that it could be much worse, I think.
How is it better to be playing LMU twice if they’re better?
You want to avoid bad teams. And play the good ones. Isn’t obvious? Or you want to inflate our ego by dodging quality opponents?
Other than Cal, anyone have a hint of who the OOC opponents might be? I’m guessing a couple of Big West, maybe a MWC or two. Don’t know if they’d try a midwest or east coast trip, but an away game against a P5 (other than Pac-12) might be fun to watch.
Assuming that the contracts that were supposed to be for 20-21 get honored, we would have return games for Nevada and Stanford, both at home in Leavey. I seem to recall the Nevada game being confirmed already but do not know about Stanford.
This past season, the Broncos played at USC in what I think had a return game agreement. The game against New Mexico State was cancelled, and (projecting my own desires a bit) that’s a game I would hope just gets moved back to this season.
It might be wishful thinking that SCU would get Stanford, Nevada, USC, and New Mexico State all at home, plus Cal away and maybe an OOC tournament with a decent squad or two. But man, that would be a fun schedule and the sort of thing we’ve been crying for since Sendek was hired.
No, that’s not at all obvious.
The only reason to want to play a tougher schedule in the conference is for at-large bid consideration, which isn’t going to happen.
In league play, more wins is better. There is no caveat to that.
With 8 newcomers, I don’t feel like stacking the non-conference is very conducive to team development. Fortunately, the top 3 players are back, but that’s still a lot of integration that needs to happen.
The only one of those I would really rather not see is USC. Just inviting them to scout future transfers.
Stanford is probably better but it’s a game that makes sense in general.
Just not sure you need all of those in one season. Confidence and a sense of settling going into conference play is going to be important with as many experienced players coming back as most teams have.
I’d rather have a tougher non-conference than wcc.
How tough should the non-conference be? I’m lukewarm on HZ’s take that we have 8 new guys so we should schedule easier teams. The way things are going with college hoops is that we’ll have a bunch of newcomers every year. Should we not play anyone ever?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m with Midwest on this one. But even if I were more sympathetic to the idea that a weaker schedule is important for team cohesion, I don’t feel like the schedule as presented is a brutal schedule by any means. I think that you maybe agree with that based on your comment, HZ.
Stanford, Cal, Nevada, and NMSU are basically at or around the level of “good” mid-majors–exactly where SCU should be if the current regime is worth its salt. Duke or Virginia or Baylor they are not. I could definitely see the argument for not brutalizing the players in OOC by playing 6 Big Ten teams, but that’s not really what’s on the table. USC is a stretch. The others are very beatable. And having 6-7 really solid games in the OOC should be the standard for SCU’s scheduling.
I’m not hopeful that this will come to pass, but I still would really love to not play 3 SWAC teams this season. If SCU needs tune-up games, they should play very beatable CA teams that would nevertheless have some local interest like Cal Poly, UCSB, Davis, CSU Fullerton, etc.
You make a good point about there being turnover every year.
But 4 of these guys didn’t play last year – 3 of them missed out on their senior year of high school. That’s a lot of rust and lost opportunity to get game experience.
Only Pipes is where you would want a guy to be experience and game-ready wise.
If most of the newcomers were 2-3 year starters at smaller programs, I would say you’re right and it shouldn’t be a problem. But it’s not. Not even close.
Stanford is definitely not a mid major. They’ve had a player taken in the first 35 picks of the draft the last 2 years, and this year will certainly make 3 (and that one wasn’t their best player last year). They have another 5 star recruit coming in along with probably northern California’s best prospect. Stanford has recruited very well of late and would finish a very comfortable 2nd in this league the last few years, and would be a significant favorite over SCU. The only reason this game is even brought up is because of geography.
Cal makes sense. Nevada and NMSU? Sure. Stanford, I mean maybe one of them or USC if you’re making good money on the guarantee for the game. Not both.
I would argue Arizona State and Colorado would be better targets if you’re looking Pac-12. ASU is poorly coached and get media attention due to Herb’s history there, and Colorado is losing the best player in their program in the last 25 years. Boyle is an outstanding coach, but it’s going to be hard to replace the guys they’re losing right away.
But I don’t know why we need to be looking at Pac-12. It’s not like SCU relies on California in recruiting. Heck, we should try to play Harvard and Yale so if we beat them we can be like “look, we’re better than those guys”. Because they are definitely going to be teams we will see on the recruiting trail. We should play in the Midwest. And if you’re going to play big time guarantee games, you should play them in games you’re going to get on national tv. Stanford and USC are the worst of all worlds there – games you’re probably going to lose and most of the country will never even know you played them.
Duke would be a good one in Coach K’s last year. K always said he had a lot of respect for Sendek and what he dealt with in his time at NC State, and how he improved the program. Sure, very likely you lose, but you get paid well and you hopefully get some awareness lift and some nice words said about the coach by a legend in a year when every move he makes is going to be followed.
A decent invitational with a mix of levels (so, not Maui or Atlantis) wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
But i would try to start with 3-4 games where guys that don’t have a lot of experience can just get their feet wet playing for USC, and in many cases just playing in competitive games for the first time in 2 years.
Probably won’t get a shot v Duke, but the last time (about 9-10 years ago) was a really good game that was close most of the way. Foster, Trasolini, Cowels and that bunch eventually fell 90-77 in what was one of KK’s best games.
Agree with a couple of posts: Enough with larding on SWAC or similar…maybe a couple of games is enough. Big West games against the UC satellites (Irvine,SB,Davis, even a Riverside like last year would be tough outs, but good games. Agree with HZ that a midwest or east would be a return to scheduling of twenty odd years ago, when the Broncs traveled quite a bit. So maybe a couple of PAC-12s, couple of warm-ups, 3-4 mids (say Big West or MW like Boise or Utah State, some tournament, and then try for an away P5 not in the PAC-12.
Probably bears mentioning that covid may impact decisions on travel for this year. I wouldn’t want to be sending players to highly unvaccinated environments (like, pretty much the entire south). The delta variant (or epsilon, or whatever by that point) could well threaten even vaccinated people.
So that would argue against a lot of travel this year.
Lot to consider. They probably aren’t going to ask me. I just hope for an uninterrupted season where the player get to practice in one place, live in their normal homes, etc. And then we’ll see what they can do on the court in hopefully a balanced environment (because I don’t want anyone else to have to go through what we and Stanford did last year, either).
Expect the same garbage teams pre WCC that Herb stacks his SCU seasons with. Google Santa Clara Basketball and you’ll find the most common question people ask is “Is Santa Clara d1 basketball?” Enough said.
To be fair, it asks the same question for St. Mary’s and pretty much all the WCC except Gonzaga and BYU.
The second question for Gonzaga is “Is Gonzaga a Mormon School?” ha
You’d rather they stack the schedule so you have something to complain about.
Do you think it sounds better to Mr. Blue this weekend to hear about back to back .600 seasons for the first time in 20 years despite having to move the whole program out to Santa Cruz? Or “we finished with a losing record but believe me we the teams we lost to were good”?
Overscheduling is by definition counter productive. But it’s silly when there is no benefit to it until you are an NCAA tournament at large bid contender, which in this conference is going to take quite a lot.