Look no further than the final week of calendar 2025 to see the perennial scheduling quandary Sun Belt Conference basketball programs encounter. On Dec. 29, Old Dominion plays at Maryland, followed the next evening by James Madison’s test at Arkansas.
Look no further than Valentine’s Day to see the impact of the ACC’s pivot from 20 to 18 conference games. On that Saturday, Virginia faces Ohio State in Nashville, while Louisville plays Baylor in Fort Worth, Texas.
As coaches ponder their own scheduling approach, and as commissioners/athletic directors contemplate their conference’s path, it’s all about NCAA Tournament positioning.
How best to convince the tournament selection committee that your teams merit at-large bids? How best to game the NET and other metrics the panel evaluates?
That’s why Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill, the 2025-26 selection committee chairman, said his league may shift from 18 to 20 conference games. And that’s why his ACC counterpart, Jim Phillips, pushed for this season’s move from 20 to 18.
Such are the disparate realities for a mid-major league that has qualified multiple teams for the tournament only twice in the past 30 years (Sun Belt) and a traditional power conference frustrated/humbled by its recent failure to earn the quantity of at-large bids folks expect (ACC).
“It really is a problem for (Sun Belt teams) to try to schedule the games that are best for (building) the best resumé to get an at-large selection,” Gill said.
Indeed, precious few programs from the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Big East — the sport’s monied power brokers — will consider playing a mid-major on the road. Moreover, accomplished mid-majors such as JMU — the Dukes have a combined 74 victories the past three seasons — find it difficult to land road dates with power opponents.
“And so, we (quality mid-majors) end up playing each other,” JMU coach Preston Spradlin said.
Hence, the Dukes’ contests this season versus five opponents that won their conference regular-season and/or tournament championship in 2024-25: Norfolk State, Towson, George Mason, Omaha and Akron, the latter Monday in the Sun Belt’s challenge series against the Mid-American Conference.
JMU’s game with Arkansas? Spradlin said that wouldn’t have happened had he not worked for Razorbacks coach John Calipari as a graduate assistant at Kentucky from 2009-11.
Entering his fifth and final season on the selection committee, Gill is a valuable resource to Sun Belt programs striving to schedule wisely, and given the hurdles his teams face in that quest, playing more conference games could make sense.
Gill’s advice: Win 70-75% of nonconference games against the most challenging opponents possible.
Good luck. No Sun Belt team hit 70% last season, and only JMU and Appalachian State did in 2023-24.
ODU likely will find that benchmark elusive this season. Its three games versus power conference teams are on the road — at Xavier, Villanova and Maryland — and came about, in part, because of connections. Monarchs coach Mike Jones worked for Villanova coach Kevin Willard in 2023-24 at Maryland.
ODU, picked to finish 5th in Sun Belt, takes on road-heavy men’s basketball schedule
ODU’s nonconference schedule includes a meager four home games and road tests against the Atlantic 10’s George Washington, George Mason and Richmond, plus the Coastal Athletic Association’s William & Mary.
“It’s going to be a year-to-year thing,” Jones said of scheduling and noting that some of this season’s road opponents will play in Norfolk next year. “We want to have the best schedule possible. We want to have a schedule that’s attractive, but we also know that we’re serving a lot of different purposes with our schedule.”
Among those purposes is compensating a roster that this season includes nine returnees, strikingly high retention in this new era of revenue sharing and transfer freedom.
“We’re not ashamed of saying, like, some of the money we’re getting for playing these games on the road helped us to have the roster we have,” Jones said.
Conversely, power conference programs, which pay their athletes handsomely through television revenue and donor-funded endorsement deals, have scheduling freedom. What ACC coaches and officials concluded is that playing 20 league games limited their nonconference options and ability to impress the NCAA selection committee.
Perhaps, but the real issue is that collectively ACC teams have been dreadful recently against outside competition, never more so than in last year’s SEC-ACC Challenge, won by the SEC 14-2. And what subsequently transpired Selection Sunday?
An unprecedented 14 of the SEC’s 16 teams made the NCAA field, a paltry four of the ACC’s 18. Last season marked the first time since 2013, when the conference had just 12 members, that only four ACC teams qualified for the bracket.
Even worse: The ACC has produced five or fewer NCAA Tournament teams in each of the past four years. The last time that happened was 1982-85, when conference membership was eight schools.
“We have to do our part (against nonconference opponents) in November and December,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said. “We’ve got to challenge ourselves with difficult games. We’ve got to find good games.
“Our league needs to keep working to find good games and opportunities for some of the middle-tier programs. Duke, North Carolina, Louisville and those guys: They’re going to find games all the time. Some of the rest of us, we need a little help.”
Kentucky head coach Mark Pope, left, and Clemson head coach Brad Brownell talk before an NCAA college basketball game Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2024, in Clemson, S.C. (AP Photo/Artie Walker Jr.)
Brownell and many of his ACC colleagues successfully lobbied Phillips and their athletic directors for a return to 18 conference games. Now ACC teams need to perform.
They’ll have beaucoup opportunities, witness this sampling of games coaches told me they added to their schedule after the switch to 18:
UVA opted for neutral-site contests against Dayton in Charlotte and Ohio State in Nashville. Virginia Tech scheduled Providence in Uncasville, Connecticut, and a home date with George Mason.
North Carolina is hosting Georgetown, NC State is playing Ole Miss in Greensboro and Duke is Madison Square Garden-bound to face Texas Tech. Pitt added contests against Penn State (neutral) and Villanova (road this year and home next).
Wake Forest scheduled Vanderbilt (home) and West Virginia (neutral), while Clemson arranged a neutral-site contest against Cincinnati, as Louisville did with Baylor.
Brownell is the dean of ACC coaches, entering his 16th season at Clemson, and there was a time when he quietly rooted against league rivals during nonconference play. But as the selection committee became more and more enamored of those results, Brownell reversed course.
“Now it’s like, November and December, we’d better have our pom-poms out for everybody (in the league),” he said. “You want everybody to win as many games as they can.”
David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com
