Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Last week, I wrote a story about Miami (OH)’s efforts to assemble their men’s basketball schedule. According to emails I obtained via open records requests, Miami’s coaching staff reached out to over a dozen high-profile programs, including Ohio State, UCLA, USC, Mississippi State, and Oregon, about setting up a game this season. All declined.
This story seemed to really resonate with many people (including Ohio University Men’s Basketball coach Jeff Boals. Thanks for reading, coach!), since I think most fans understand that it can be very difficult for mid-major programs to get quality games, and that many of the metrics that decide NCAA Tournament access are biased against smaller schools.
But based on some of the questions I was getting in my social media mentions, my inbox, text messages, etc…many fans are misunderstanding some key components about how basketball scheduling works.
Let me try to pull back the curtain and help explain a few things.
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Who is typically responsible for scheduling basketball games?
While the head coach will unquestionably be involved in determining a general strategy and parameters for the schedule, the actual grunt work in finding games is usually handled by an assistant coach, a director of basketball operations, or an associate AD. Men’s basketball scheduling is rarely something a D-1 AD would be directly involved with.
Many conferences will also establish scheduling partnerships or “Challenge” events, so the dates and matchups for those events will be handled at the conference level. Miami (OH), for example, participated in the MAC/Sun Belt challenge, which setup their matchup with Marshall. ACC and SEC teams play in the SEC/ACC Challenge. There are several other similar arrangements.
Conferences may also vote to set certain schedule standards that schools are responsible for hitting, like a limit on non-D1 games, a requirement to schedule X number of home games, etc.
Broadcast networks and third-party event promoters can also be involved in this process. As you might imagine, ESPN is generally more likely to be involved in securing a big game November game for Texas than they would be for East Texas A&M.
So if the coaches are the ones involved, why wouldn’t they want to play a quality mid-major opponent?
The biggest reason comes down to the NET, or the NCAA Evaluation Tool. This is the metric the NCAA Selection Committee uses to determine tournament bids and seeds.
A team’s wins and losses are sorted into four quadrants. Having lots of Quad 1 wins is awesome. Having lots of Quad 4 losses is terrible. Via the NCAA website, here is how those quads are defined:
Using the quadrant system, which was in its fourth season in 2020-21, the quality of wins and losses will be organized based on game location and the opponent's NET ranking.
Quadrant 1: Home 1-30, Neutral 1-50, Away 1-75
Quadrant 2: Home 31-75, Neutral 51-100, Away 76-135
Quadrant 3: Home 76-160, Neutral 101-200, Away 135-240
Quadrant 4: Home 161-353, Neutral 201-353, Away 241-353
That means that the Quad system doesn’t meaningfully differentiate between a home win against a good Tennessee State team that just won 20 games and the OVC (Net: 170) and say, a three-win Air Force team (NET: 349).
So if a home game against a terrible team and a home game against a team good enough to beat you all count the same…why play the good team, right?
Since losses against Quad 3 and Quad 4 teams are considered damaging to a prospective NCAA tournament team’s résumé, high-major programs have sought to play their guarantee games against the lowest-ranked Division I teams they can find. Those low-risk matchups allow power-conference teams to pad their win totals. Massive margins of victory also help those high-majors improve their standing in the NET, KenPom and other predictive metrics used by the selection committee.
Left with scant options are mid-majors who don’t fit neatly into either one of those buckets, teams like Miami, High Point, Belmont or Liberty. Power-conference teams perceive those types of dangerous matchups as having plenty of downside and little reward.
“It's very challenging if you're not Quad 1 or Quad 4,” {Miami OH athletic director David] Sayler said. “Nobody wants to play you if you’re Quad 2 or Quad 3 because you can do nothing but damage to them if you beat them or if the game is closer than people think it should have been.
What is a “Buy” game or a “Guarantee” game? How does that stuff work?
If a school wants to invite another program to play a one-off game, they’re gonna have to pay them. A single-game contract where one school pays another school to play them at home is called a “buy” or “Guarantee” game.
This is not a practice that is limited to just the biggest programs. Everybody does it. The largest programs will buy lots of games, mid-majors will both buy other opponents and be bought themselves, and low majors will buy D-II, D-III or even NAIA opponents.
The money that changes hands is meant to pay for the expenses needed to pay for the travel expenses of the entire university traveling party (players + coaches, trainers, operations personnel, etc.), plus a little extra. Schools can decide to play lots of these buy games to earn critical revenue for their athletic department (including their athlete rev-share obligations) or only play a few “buy” games to give their team a better shot at being competitive on the court.
As an example, this season, Miami (OH) paid Maine $70,000 to come play at Oxford.
Last season, Maine went 20-14 and had a NET rating near 200, which would have been a nice game for the Redhawks. This year, they went 8-24 and have a sub-300 NET. Less ideal.
In my professional experience of looking at tons of these kinds of contracts, $70K isn’t a crazy amount of money. High majors may pay six figures or slightly above. Here’s LSU paying FIU $100,000 to play this year, for example.
Anywhere in the $60K-$105K would be aligned with the going rate. Bigger budget schools usually need to pay more in compensation, as would a school that really needs a game late in the process.
Going off data from the Extra Points Library, revenue-challenged athletic departments (like New Orleans, Chicago State, MVSU, Utah Tech, etc) earn well north of $500,000 a year from these game guarantees. For MAC programs, the range is usually closer to $350,000-$150,000. Some programs are able to avoid playing buy games at all.
It is not practical to expect any program to travel and play anybody else for free, given the costs associated with traveling, food, etc. Even if you’re booking an NAIA team, you need to be prepared to cut a check… and then hope you can sell enough tickets, hot dogs and parking spaces to still come out in the black. I don’t have a ton of these contracts floating around, but the guarantees for non D-1 teams that I’ve seen are usually around $10,000.
It would not be practical to expect Miami to offer to play high major programs for free…nor would the prospect of potentially saving $80,000 or whatever be enough to placate a high-major coach who is worried about picking up a Quad 4 loss in November.
In college football scheduling, btw, it’s very common for schools to still exchange payments over a home-and-home schedule arrangement (i.e. the home team pays the visiting team $300,000 both years). That can happen in college basketball, but I’ve also seen plenty of home-and-home contracts where no money is exchanged. But if somebody backs out without fulfilling their obligation during a home and home, they’ll absolutely need to pay.
Besides schedule strength, what else factors into schedule decisions/limitations?
It’s more complicated than you might think. I reached out to a few dobos/ex-assistant coaches, and here are a few other factors they mentioned to me:
Arena availability dates. Most men’s basketball programs are not the only tenant of their arena. Schools need to juggle men’s basketball dates with when the women’s team might need the gym, as well as other sports (wrestling? volleyball?) or other events (concerts, high school basketball, university programming, etc.).
Budget. While it’s rare for a game to fall apart over one team wanting more money than the other is willing to pay, schools do have to balance their internal requirements for buying games/being bought. If a team is already playing five buy games, they might not want to play Duke, even if they ask…or a team may not be able to afford buying an interested low-major without being bought themselves.
How these dates fit in with the rest of the schedule. Nobody wants to make three different cross-country flights if there’s a way to link multiple games across one trip. If you play a game on Tuesday, maybe you don’t want to schedule a particularly tough opponent for the day or two after that game. You can have two teams that are interested in playing each other but simply don’t have an open date that works with both programs.
Personal relationships. College coaching isn’t that large of a business, and coaches may try to help out buddies or programs where they have previous relationships. It isn’t uncommon, for example, for a coach to schedule a mid-major program where he used to coach, or where some of his assistants might have coached. Coaches may also decide to play road games where they might normally play, as a way to let a senior play in front of his hometown crowd, or to help land a particular recruit/transfer. It’s also not unheard of for coaches to target locations where a major donor may live. Like with everything else in this world, it pays to have friends.
2 for 1 or 3 for 1 schedule arrangements, while not impossible, are much less common nowadays than they were a decade ago, coaches tell me.
Okay then, mister smartypants, you filed your fancy FOIA and the PDFs from Miami only mentioned 19 schools. Did they really only reach out to 19 schools? That doesn’t sound like they were trying very hard.
So the exact request that I filed with Miami asked for every single email, sent and received, involving any member of Miami’s coaching staff, from April 15, 2025, through October 15, 2025.
Some scheduling conversations may very well have happened before April 15 (I limited the search to six months to save time and money on my request), and if they did, I wouldn’t have access to those messages. I also did not request phone records, so any conversation that occurred via text messaging or over the phone wouldn’t have shown up in my request. I could only access emails, which would also mean that any communications sent via other digital platforms (like WinAD, Rivalsmaker, the Basketball Travelers message board, etc) wouldn’t show up.
In a previous interview with Yahoo!, Miami assistant coach Jonathan Holmes said they reached out to 75-90 teams and were turned down, including many quality mid-major programs. I think that’s a believable number, given what I saw just from my email request. I would be very, very surprised if those 19 messages were the only ones Miami actually sent.
So, to all the Cincinnati fans in my social media mentions and DMs, screaming that Miami turned down a game with them (or with Santa Clara or Saint Mary’s or some other teams)… I can only write about the receipts that I have.
Is it possible that Miami ducked somebody? Sure, it’s possible. But that wasn’t in any of the documentation that I got. And any other reporter trying to replicate my approach with other programs should understand that plenty of schedule conversations will still happen outside the practical scope of open records requests.
Do I have a solution?
Not an easy one. Coaches and administrators who are far smarter and more plugged in than I have attempted to set up mid-season bracketbuster type events, but they’ve been difficult to scale and execute. Conference schedule agreements, multi-team events (MTEs), and league rules that discourage non-D1 contests can all help, but none of them are enough.
I am not a good enough math wizard to suggest a tweak to the NET that would reward schools for playing quality schedules and wouldn’t penalize mid and low-majors who don’t get 16+ Quad 1 opportunities during conference play. I’d like to think such a magic formula exists, but it is beyond my training as a liberal arts graduate.
All I can say is that I don’t think it would be fair to look at college basketball schedules as some sort of morality play. You do what you gotta do to make the Tournament. And right now, for many schools, it doesn’t make competitive sence to play a mid-major who might clobber you during the early part of the season.
That’s why you see teams like Miami playing non D-1 opponents. And that’s why you see debates like this, just about every March.
