Swipe right: The challenges and nightmares of college basketball scheduling

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Quick note:

I am going to be in Raleigh this weekend for the 2nd Annual Sports Podcast Festival, with pals like Split Zone Duo, Ovies and Giglio and more. On Friday at 8 p.m. ET, at Bond Brothers Eastside in Cary, NC, I’ll do a live segment with other sports podcast friends. There’s also the main event on Saturday night. There are still tickets out there, so if you grab one here, you can use promo code SPF25 to get a second ticket for half off. Tickets include shirts from Homefield Apparel. See you there!

Today, I’m happy to pass the mic over to our newest teammate, KC Smurthwaite, to give us a closer look at the surprisingly complicated world of basketball scheduling. His words are below.

They read like a Craigslist ad for dating — or maybe a Tinder profile.

Looking for December 7th, flexible… willing to pay.

Need to be bought, desperate for something between November 10th and 21st.

If you’re reading this and wondering, “Wait… what site am I on?” you’d be forgiven for double-checking the URL. But this isn’t a story about personal ads; it’s about basketball coaches … well, let’s stay on brand here … soliciting for non-conference games.

It’s mid-August, and there are still plenty of empty schedules, much to the chagrin of university marketing and ticketing departments. (Somewhere, a ticket-office staffer is muttering, “It’s hard to sell tickets when we don’t have a schedule.”) Scheduling isn’t a walk in the park, and in this new era of collegiate athletics, it’s only getting harder.

“There’s a massive misconception that basketball non-conference scheduling is easy,” said South Dakota basketball coach Eric Peterson, who last season guided the Coyotes to 19 wins, a near-perfect 14-2 home record and one of the nation’s top-scoring offenses. “It’s easily one of the hardest parts of the job, yet one of the most important for our success.”

Sometimes, the task doesn’t even fall to the head coach; an athletic director or sport administrator handles it. And that can cause problems, especially when priorities clash between revenue, competitive balance and travel costs.

A veteran assistant coach at a Power Four program who handles scheduling put it bluntly: “We are buying wins. Sure, we look at it through the lens of building a NET [ranking], but at the end of it all, we know we’ll be buoyed up by conference games. For smaller schools, it just comes down to a week in March. That’s it: Fill the schedule, get the money, and win in March.”

Every year, right through September — and sometimes into October — fans, donors, season ticketholders and even internal staff grumble: Why isn’t our schedule done? Why can’t we get [insert team here]? This school already has its schedule out!

I know this because I was one of those people — both as a fan and as an employee. I’ll take it further: I was a men’s basketball sport supervisor. I still remember the sly smile and light chuckle the first time I brought it up to then–Southern Utah coach Todd Simon. He flipped the calendar around, handed me a list — most of which I already had from WinAD’s “Games Wanted” board — and said, “Go for it.”

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