It’s as predictable as snowfall in Duluth. Every November and December, college basketball fans gather in person, in chat rooms or on social media to gripe about their favorite team’s non-conference schedule.
In most locales, the complaints feature some variation of, Why are we paying full price to watch our team play so many nobodies? In Minnesota, that’s generally directed at the University of Minnesota men’s and women’s teams. But with St. Thomas joining the Gophers in Division I, additional questions arise unique to this market.
That includes:
Why can’t the Gopher men get “blue blood” teams to come play at Williams Arena, like the women did last year with UConn?
Why do the St. Thomas men and women still play Division III teams?
And, most provocatively: Are the Gophers and Tommies ever going to play each other?
For the latter, expect it to happen on the women’s side long before the men get around to it. (More on that later.)
MinnPost spoke to coaches at all four programs to learn why their schedules are the way they are, and how much NCAA-driven mathematical formulas and analytics factor into their scheduling. Short answer: A lot more than people realize.
“Everything is numbers-based now,” said Minnesota men’s coach Ben Johnson. “I get it. Fans aren’t supposed to know all this stuff. But we never make decisions on a whim. So much goes into it.”
Each program approaches things slightly differently, so we’ll deal with them separately.
(Disclosure: The author is a student journalism adviser at St. Thomas.)
University of Minnesota men
For the Gophers, it’s all about the NET — the NCAA Evaluation Tool rankings, which the NCAA adopted in 2018-19 to replace Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) for choosing and seeding the NCAA Tournament. It’s a complicated formula that considers results, strength of schedule, margin of victories and several other factors in ranking all 364 teams in Division I.
For coaches like Johnson in Power Five conferences, the goal is crafting a schedule that produces a high enough NET ranking to secure an at-large bid in the NCAA Tournament. It takes the right mix of quality opponents (i.e. likely NCAA Tournament teams) and winnable games (vs. mid-majors or teams with a NET ranking or 300 of higher). Add nine to 11 more wins in conference play, Johnson says, and your team should be in good shape.
Head coaches generally delegate a staffer to contact potential opponents; assistant athletic director Ryan Livingston handles it for the Gophers. But Johnson says it takes a ton of research to identify the right teams, especially with the transfer portal leaving so many rosters in flux well into the summer. Schedules used to be locked in by springtime; now they often take until August or September.
“I don’t think the outside world always sees what goes into scheduling,” Johnson said.
All teams want lots of home games to maximize revenue and limit missed class time. Optimally, Power Five teams seek home-and-home deals — we play one year at your place, the next year at ours, or vice versa. Failing that, Power Fives offer to pay opponents to come to play them at home, arrangements known as “buy games.” Per industry sources, payouts range from $30,000 to $100,000 depending on timing and resources. The U paid $478,000 for buy games in 2022-23, according to its most recent NCAA Financial Report.
For mid-majors like Bethune-Cookman, which played at Williams Arena earlier this month, buy games help pay the bills. But not every team can be bought, or agree to travel to Minnesota in December.
“I’m humble enough to know we ain’t getting Duke to come here home and home,” Johnson said. “In the history of our program, we’ve never had teams like that. So you’ve got to think about, if you’re going to go home and home with a Power Five, who’s comparable to us that we could get realistically and also give us a chance to win, but at the same time we think is going to be a good (NET) numbers game?”
Take this season’s schedule. With three starters gone and 11 new players to break in, Johnson said he sought teams that resembled specific Big Ten opponents.
Yale isn’t Duke, but last year it made the NCAA Tournament and upset Auburn in the first round; Johnson said it runs an offensive system similar to Northwestern and Wisconsin. (The Gophs needed a late rally to beat the Bulldogs by three.) North Texas played intense, physical defense, like Michigan State, in upsetting the Gophs 54-51.
Wake Forest, highly rated in the Atlantic Coast Conference, brought athleticism. Wichita State, with five high-major transfers, plays up-tempo with a smaller lineup. (Minnesota lost to both in a tournament in Orlando.) And Fairleigh Dickinson comes in later this week with a 22-point scorer in Minneapolis product Terrence Brown, posing a defensive challenge for Johnson’s guards.
Non-conference games at Williams Arena tend to draw fewer fans than Big Ten games, and local clamoring for the Gophers to play St. Thomas to boost attendance continues. Johnson says he isn’t interested because there’s little benefit for his team, something he experienced firsthand earlier in his career.
As an assistant at Northern Iowa in December 2009, Johnson watched the mid-major Panthers beat Iowa convincingly at home. Though that was one of UNI’s best seasons — it won the Missouri Valley Conference and shocked top-ranked Kansas in the NCAA Tournament — Iowa still took heat in the state for losing. Eventually, Iowa stopped scheduling UNI and Drake, its other in-state mid-major.
“It’s my job to do right for this program,” Johnson said. “I can’t worry about any of the outside stuff. Does it make sense for Minnesota basketball, for my kids, to play a game like that, that all it is is a risk for us? Because I know what the narrative is going to be.
“If we lose, it’s going to be talked about forever, and everybody’s going to bring up that, forever. If we win — and again, this is not me being negative, but I know what it’s going to be — let’s nitpick the win. What did they win by? They won by 10? Oh my God, they only beat them by 10. They won by 15? Ah, they won by 15 or 20, but with 10 minutes to go it was a one-point game. You know what I mean? I don’t need my guys reading about that, dealing with that.
“So I get it. I totally understand it. From my lens, does it benefit our program in any way? I think it’s really hard to justify why that would benefit us, when I feel there’s so much to lose.”
University of Minnesota women
Second-year Gophers coach Dawn Plitzuweit crafts her team’s schedule much like Johnson, with NET and an at-large NCAA bid in mind. She researched how other Big Ten teams did it and tried to follow that pattern. It’s a strategy Plitzuweit learned from Brian Kelly, the former Notre Dame football coach now at Louisiana State, when both coached at Division II Grand Valley State in Michigan.
“You have to study teams that have done what you’re trying to do, and take a deep dive into how they’ve scheduled and try to emulate that to the best of your ability,” Plitzuweit said. “The analytics and metrics of it definitely play factors in how you want to schedule in your non-conference, absolutely.”
Last year Plitzuweit inherited much of her non-conference schedule from predecessor Lindsay Whalen, including that game with UConn, a homecoming for Hopkins product Paige Bueckers. This year, Plitzuweit asked associate head coach Jason Jeschke, who handles the schedule, to make some changes.
The Gophs added out-of-state tournaments in Tempe, Arizona, and New Orleans to get used to traveling and playing on consecutive days. At home, they tried to mix challenging opponents with likely wins. Though losing top scorer Mara Braun to a broken bone in her right foot, Minnesota started 10-0 before losing its Big Ten opener at Nebraska.
“We were intentional about playing (teams with) different styles,” Plitzuweit said. “That’s what you see in the Big Ten. In that aspect, it’s been really good. Now we can go back and show film to our team of a non-conference opponent and what they did, and then a conference opponent. That is beneficial for sure.”
Unlike Johnson, Plitzuweit said she’s open to scheduling a game with St. Thomas at some point. Plitzuweit said she knows Tommies Coach Ruth Sinn from her Summit League days at South Dakota, and last season tried to arrange a closed preseason scrimmage with St. Thomas.
“Is it something we would do in the future if they’re interested in doing it? Yeah. I think that could be a good possibility, I really do,” Plitzuweit said. “Year One, it just didn’t work. I don’t think we had conversations about it this year. But in the future, I do think that it makes sense.”
St. Thomas men
Tommies Associate Head Coach Mike Maker dreams big. He sees a day where St. Thomas plays the nation’s premier Catholic schools — Notre Dame, Gonzaga, Boston College and Villanova — as well as regional Catholic opponents like DePaul, and even some Big Ten schools.
It’s not happening yet because, well, the Tommies are too competitive. Close games with nationally-ranked Creighton and Marquette the last two seasons made Maker’s scheduling job that much harder.
After Arizona State beat St. Thomas 81-66 earlier this season, a game where the Tommies trailed by three with eight minutes left, Sun Devils Coach Bobby Hurley said, “There are easier teams that you most likely could find to play than this one.” Power Fives seek mid-majors they can beat by 20 points or more to help their NET rankings. That’s no guarantee with the Tommies, who briefly cracked the NET Top 100 earlier this season, so Maker hears a lot of nos.
“You can only play someone that’s a willing dance partner,” said Maker, a former assistant at West Virginia, Creighton, Samford and Dartmouth and a head coach at Marist. “As we’ve gotten better, it’s become more and more challenging to find willing dance partners within our parameters, to get a competitive schedule and the right schedule for us.”
The Big Sky-Summit Challenge series guarantees St. Thomas two games every season, home and away. But Western Illinois’ departure from the Summit League meant Maker had to find two more non-conference games.
St. Thomas is in no position to “buy” opponents, either. None of its teams belongs to a conference with a lucrative television contract, and Tommie athletics is still being subsidized by the university as part of its five-year transition from Division III. The scarcity of non-conference Division I teams within bus distance of St. Paul doesn’t help, either.
So Maker filled out the home schedule with three Division III schools — Crown, North Central, and St. Norbert from Green Bay. Those one-sided victories make up one-third of the season win total for the 9-4 Tommies. Summit League schools in the Dakotas have the same issue, with even fewer options.
“The average amount of non-Division I home games for our league is over three games a year,” Maker said. “Maybe someday we won’t play them. But until the landscape changes, they’re a necessity right now to make sure we’re not on the road all the time.”
With the 5,000-capacity Lee and Penny Anderson Arena on campus set to open next fall, Maker is trying to land a marquee opponent for the first game. “Those are really challenging to get,” he said. “But we can all dream, and my job is to find the right dance partner that’s willing to do that.”
St. Thomas women
In one sense, scheduling has been a little easier for the Tommie women, who got Iowa State and Wisconsin to come to 1,800-capacity Schoenecker Arena on campus in previous seasons. But it took Coach Ruth Sinn signing off on a 2-for-1 arrangement, committing to two games at Ames and Madison, respectfully, in exchange for the one home game. That’s the only incentive the Tommies can offer.
“Those are the compromises we have to make to get some of these teams,” Sinn said.
Assistant coach Kyle Lurvey handles scheduling for St. Thomas. Though regional opponents Milwaukee and Drake agreed to come to St. Paul this season, the 7-4 Tommies still needed home games with Crown and Macalester to balance out November road trips to Northern Illinois, Iowa State, Oakland (Michigan) and Wichita State.
“To get home games, we’ve got to have a willing participant,” Sinn said. “If we can offer anything, we can offer a home-and-home. Otherwise, getting someone to come here is not something we can do, or other teams will take us up on.”
Sinn believes playing the Gophers, even at Williams Arena, would dramatically boost women’s basketball statewide. She points to Iowa, where, unlike the men, all four Division I schools still play each other. Iowa kids who commit to Drake and UNI know they’ll play at Iowa and Iowa State in their careers, a big selling point for in-state recruiting.
“In doing so, they’re building a kind of camaraderie and excitement around women’s basketball at the state of Iowa,” Sinn said. “You go to some of those games, it’s sold out, and it’s exciting. That’s the difficulty with us. Being a metro school, we don’t have that rivalry, number one, and we don’t have that sense of, how are we growing women’s basketball in the state of Minnesota right now?”
