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How the Mountain West is trying to fix its basketball problem
When San Diego State became the Mountain West’s first outright regular-season champion to miss the NCAA tournament last March, the snub was difficult for the Aztecs to stomach.
They went 16-2 in league play and finished three games ahead of any other team, yet a five-point loss in the Mountain West title game doomed their hopes. The selection committee felt dominating an unusually weak Mountain West wasn’t enough of an accomplishment to atone for a couple of head-scratching non-league losses.
“We were very disappointed,” San Diego State coach Steve Fisher said. “We felt that with our huge separation, three games ahead of everyone else, that should have been enough. We shot ourselves in the foot a little bit in non-league play, but I do still believe that we had a résumé worthy of being in.”
Another Mountain West champion experiencing the same disappointment this March is no longer just a chilling possibility for the league. A second straight one-bid NCAA tournament is now likely given the Mountain West’s non-conference struggles this season.
Teams in the Mountain West went 2-18 against KenPom top 50 opponents, 4-25 against the top 100 and 27-42 against the top 200. The two most impressive results teams from the Mountain West achieved during non-league play are Boise State’s victory over American Athletic Conference contender SMU and San Diego State’s win over potential NCAA tournament contender Cal.
The outlook is just as bleak if the metric of choice is the RPI, where the Mountain West went 1-16 against the top 50, 6-26 against the top 100 and 27-39 against the top 200. Of the 11 teams in the Mountain West, only Nevada (40) and Boise State (56) are currently in the RPI top 100.
Mountain West coaches acknowledge their teams must perform better in non-conference play, yet they hold out hope the selection committee will take into account other factors should this year’s league champion run through the league the way San Diego State did last season. To win on the road in the league, a team must endure high-altitude games, crowds larger than many power-conference programs draw and the challenges of traveling to remote Mountain West cities in winter weather.
“I’ve coached in the SEC and the Pac-12, and the venues and the travel in the Mountain West are so underrated,” Nevada coach Eric Musselman said. “To win at New Mexico, to win at San Diego State, to win at Wyoming, that’s really hard. You have to be an awfully good team to win at those places.”
That the Mountain West has to plead for an at-large bid is surprising considering the league’s rich basketball history.
It was only four years ago that the Mountain West finished the season No. 1 in RPI and sent five teams to the NCAA tournament. Just before that, the league boasted a stronger top tier than the Pac-12 when Kawhi Leonard starred at San Diego State and Jimmer Fredette was raining down 3-pointers at BYU.
One reason for the league’s sharp decline is that the league lost Utah and BYU and replaced them with programs that needed time to become competitive at a higher level. It also hasn’t helped that two of the league’s remaining name-brand programs regressed at the same time, New Mexico failing to sustain the sustained national relevance of the Steve Alford era and UNLV squandering gobs of talent under Dave Rice before beginning a massive rebuild this season.
To assess why the league has regressed, the Mountain West last spring formed a sub-committee consisting of basketball coaches, administrators and conference officials. They studied all sorts of analytic data and concluded that the league’s scheduling practices were holding it back.
“Some of our programs got a little lazy in non-conference scheduling and played an easier schedule than they probably should have,” said Mountain West senior associate commissioner Dan Butterly, the league’s primary administrator for men’s basketball. “If you’re not winning quality non-conference games, your league isn’t going to be very strong. Even if you’re winning in league, you’re not going to improve your RPI.”
The sub-committee drafted a list of eight scheduling directives last offseason and distributed them to each league member. Among the recommendations:
• Every team must participate in an exempt event guaranteeing them the chance to play against multiple teams in the top 100. Such neutral-court holiday tournaments are vital for Mountain West programs who typically struggle to persuade power-conference foes to agree to play home-and-home.
• Every team must play a certain number of non-league home games each season. That could mean getting more creative seeking out potential home-and-home series or spending more annually to buy home games against lower-tier competition. Buy games typically cost between $90,000 and $110,000 apiece, about double the average price 10 years ago.
• Every team must scrounge up a few hundred thousand dollars to spend on buy games each season. San Diego State, New Mexico and UNLV already exceed the minimum threshold the league set, but others haven’t increased their scheduling budget in years. One program in the league didn’t even have a budget for buy games as recently as last season.
• Every team must limit the number of games it plays against opponents rated 250 and below. Those games may be automatic wins, but they’re also RPI and strength of schedule albatrosses. Fresno State played six such games this season. UNLV and New Mexico both had five apiece.
• Every team must try to play one or two games per year in the Eastern or Central time zones. League officials believe playing teams outside the West will increase the league’s credibility and visibility if it can win some of those games.
Coaches across the Mountain West are in favor of most of the sub-committee’s recommendations, yet implementing them is easier said than done.
Some cash-strapped athletic departments don’t have the surplus of cash to spend $300,000 per year to buy a few extra home games. Other programs struggle to persuade quality opponents to come to their gym because they’re too tough to beat at home yet lack the pedigree to make a loss acceptable.
Wyoming has an especially tough time scheduling home-and-home series because of its remote location and 52-12 record in Laramie since the 2013-14 season. The summer before the Cowboys won 25 games and reached the 2015 NCAA tournament, their coaching staff couldn’t find a single marquee team willing to play in Laramie.
“We called every single BCS program in the country, and nobody would do it,” assistant coach Jeremy Shyatt said. “They’re not lining up to come to Laramie. They’re thinking, ‘If we go to Wyoming, what do we have to gain?'”
To combat that problem, Wyoming annually participates in exempt tournaments that allow them to face strong competition at a neutral site. The Cowboys also recently landed a two-for-one deal with South Carolina in which they’ll play the Gamecocks twice in Columbia in return for one game in Laramie.
One way the Mountain West has tried to help Wyoming, Boise State and other programs find quality home games is by organizing an annual league-wide challenge against the Missouri Valley Conference. Officials from both leagues work together every two years to arrange the most compelling possible matchups with every team guaranteed one home game and one road game.
The problem with the event is that it’s detrimental to some of the Mountain West’s more prestigious programs who have less trouble setting up strong home-and-home series every year. Those schools often get stuck with games they wouldn’t dream of scheduling on their own, especially since the Mountain West and Missouri Valley arrange the matchups so far in advance.
Instead of facing a top-tier Missouri Valley opponent that could have boosted its strength of schedule, Nevada got shipped to Bradley on Dec. 3 because the Wolf Pack were coming off a 22-loss season when the matchup was put together. Preseason Mountain West favorite San Diego State drew a road game with no upside at Loyola (Chicago) and suffered a damaging 65-59 loss, an outcome that only further solidified Fisher’s opposition to the event.
“I don’t want to go against the grain and act like I have all the answers, but it’s well documented I was an opponent to reestablishing the Missouri Valley-Mountain West Challenge,” Fisher said. “San Diego State doesn’t need it. Let us do our own scheduling, and we will get a schedule that’s representative of what the conference wants.”
Ultimately, improved scheduling alone won’t get the Mountain West back to its former level. The league has to start winning some of the big non-conference games it has let slip away the past two years.
Hope for the future lies in some of the young talent flourishing in the Mountain West this season.
With most of its rotation due back next year and NC State transfers Cody and Caleb Martin set to become eligible, Nevada appears poised to continue its ascendance. Boise State’s two leading scorers both have eligibility remaining, as do Wyoming standouts Justin James and Hayden Dalton. And don’t count out a return to form from San Diego State, which is teeming with talented sophomores and juniors.
Could the Mountain West be a year away from emerging its recent tailspin and getting back to sending three or four teams to the NCAA tournament? Fisher is optimistic, but he knows there’s only one path to a resurgence.
“If we’re going to be what we want to be and to some measure think we are, we have to win non-conference games against good teams,” Fisher said. “We haven’t done enough of that lately. Our league is better than the perception, but we have to prove it.”
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
