Quote Originally Posted by House P View Post
For better or worse, the ACC is subject to the vagaries of the quadrant system. I have some thoughts about how the ACC could potentially game the quadrant system, but I am curious to hear if the podcast folks have any other ideas.
I finally got around to listening to the podcast. Thanks for taking the time to discuss my question.

I think the podcast guys covered the gist of my primary thoughts on the topic. Namely, the ACC needs to stop treating the non-conference schedule as a 'pre-season' which doesn't really matter. From what I can tell, non-conference performance is probably more important than conference performance when it comes to seeding and making the NCAA tourney. I doubt many, if any, ACC coaches see it this way, but they probably should.

Here are some specific actions which might help.

1. Stop playing so many cupcakes. As Jason mentioned, there appears to be no value from the selection committees perspective in winning a Q3 or Q4 game. Every Q3 or Q4 game is merely an opportunity to hurt your resume.

2. If you are going to play a cupcake, do everything you can to blow them out. This may sound unsportsmanlike, but it appears that teams can help their NET rating but blowing out weaker opponents. Every year, it seems that there are a couple teams in early Jan whose NET ranking seems out of line with general perception. While the NET formula is a secret, it appears that many of these unexpectedly high ranked teams have something in common - they have a very high margin average margin of victory. I have no proof, but I suspect that this is because the efficiency component of the NET doesn't discount blowouts vs overmatched teams as much as other predictive systems like KenPom and Torvik. If this is the case, a non-conference game vs a cupcake shouldn't be seen as an opportunity to experiment and play the end of your bench. Sadly, it does seem to matter whether you win that game by 40 instead of 20, so don't let up.

2b. Consider playing Div II teams. If you must give the end of your bench extensive minutes or experiment with non-traditional lineups, consider scheduling a division II team. As far as I can tell these games don't count towards your NET rating. St. Mary's NET ranking didn't seem to take a hit last year when they played a much closer than expected game vs the Academy of Art.

3. Flip the conference and non-conference season. It is logical for coaches to want their teams to improve towards the end of the season. So it will probably be hard to get coaches to prioritize non-conference games if they are all held in Nov and Dec. The answer, of course, is that perhaps Nov and Dec should include more conference games and Jan and Feb should include a large number of conference games. This will still allow coaches to experiment with early season games, but they won't be hurting the conference's rating when doing so.