Thoughts on Big South coaching meetings and changes

It’s that time of year… Big South coaches and athletic directors descend on Hilton Head, South Carolina and hold their annual meetings. This year was the first year for Hampton and USC Upstate to be part of the process, and there was also the obvious absence of Liberty.

A few tidbits came out of Tuesday with the coach’s meetings:

The Schedule

When it comes to have 11 conference members, the Big South is pretty much alone with the Big Sky Conference and the MAAC. The Big Sky announced this week that they would play a 20 game conference schedule, so every team would play a home and home. The MAAC traditionally plays an 18 game conference slate. The Big South won’t follow either those peers and will instead play a 16 game conference schedule.

As Mike Jones explained the schedule make up, each team will have 6 “partners” that they play home and home match ups with then the remaining 4 teams will be individual games.

Personally, I think the decision to shrink the conference schedule is a bit disappointing. As a fan who sat through nearly a decade of the Independent era, the Big South games are meaningful and usually of better quality than other options. They also bring a recognizable name to Farmville.

Jones talked about how switching to a 16 game schedule provides scheduling flexibility for schools to strengthen their RPI or add more home games. That’s a nice spin, but there is no doubt that it’s more of an opportunity for schools to invite a Non-Division I to their arena or to hit the road for a guarantee game to raise more money. This isn’t a move that actually strengthens the conference in anyway unless there are stricter scheduling rules in place, but we’ve seen in the past the coach’s hesitation to limit non-D1 games and enact other measures.

I don’t think it will happen, mainly because of guarantee games, but I’d love to see the conference expand to 20 games if the conference does indeed remain at 11 members.

Interestingly enough the women’s side decided to go with an 18 game slate for conference play. 🤔 It’s odd that the two different sides have different conference slates.

The Tournament

No major changes to the Big South Tournament format. A third opening round game will be added now that the conference is 11 members.

The women’s coaches did have an interesting proposal though, as they proposed to hold two “pods” for opening round, quarter, and semifinal games at the location of the #1 and #2 seed. This is a really cool idea and something that would be great to see on the men’s side as well. It adds more energy to the tournament, exposes tournament play to two different communities, and allows for the fans at home to watch the games during normal hours.

From a competitive standpoint I wish the Big South would copy the Ohio Valley Conference model where only eight teams make the conference tournament and the 1/2 seeds get a double-bye.

Transfers

Mike Jones talked a bit about how transfers have negatively effected the league and the changes needed to help retain student-athletes. First of all, the transfer epidemic is a bit of a farce. We keep seeing year over year numbers, but it’s a data set that is fairly recent. In the past people just left teams, they weren’t “transfers”.

One example of that is Jacob Thibodeau. Who? Yea exactly…

Thibodeau was a walk-on at Longwood a few years ago. He was more or less a practice squad player who never appeared in a game for LU. Since then he’s transferred to California University of Pennsylvania and played a total of four minutes for the Vulcans this year. Is that a transfer? Sure. But let’s be real about the two-way street that is the transfer market. Players leave the Big South but they also join it at a similar rate and the coaches aren’t exactly avoiding it.

It was interesting to hear Mike Jones talk about this, a guy’s who championship team didn’t have a “up-transfer” loss and his upcoming roster sports Travis Fields (ODU), Lewis Djonkam (VCU), and Mawdo Sallah (Kansas State). It sounds like Mike is doing alright with the transfer market.