Interesting discussion with Dooley and he gives some insight as to what the conference is pushing:
“A lot of the games were in place before I got here,” Dooley said. “The league is also doing a good job of talking about scheduling. They’re almost semi-mandating that we play at least eight non-conference home games. We’ll have nine next year. As we move along, we hopefully want to play some ‘Power 5’ teams home-and-home. I think that would be something we would like to do and also challenge our team. And also get some games where we can get some younger guys some confidence.”
Dooley said the league likely wouldn’t approve of a two-for-one home-and-home series, even if it is against a name worthy foe. As a result, the Pirates’ coach plans to get a little creative in how he goes about trying to find marquee games going forward.
"We want to reach out to some of the football rivalries. We will reach out to Virginia Tech. Tennessee is local and they don’t play in the state of Carolina. We need to find some of those types of people and reach out and see if we can start a series down the road.
“We’ll try to get some multiple-team exemption tournaments on neutral courts. Neutral court games are great, too.”
“We have obviously been hurting the league’s RPI,” Dooley said. "We can’t do that. We need to raise it to where we aren’t hurting other teams, and as we get better, have a good enough RPI. Now our league will also provide good-enough games where if you’re successful, you can get an at-large bit or get into the NIT if you have those types of years. Those are the types of things you factor in.