It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways – schedule teams you can beat, improve your team’s metrics and reputation, recruit better players, schedule and beat better teams – but the sanctification doesn’t come easy. As any school’s director of basketball operations will tell you, likely with smoke pouring out of their ears, there is no magic formula to scheduling out-of-conference opponents, even for accomplished, quality programs. The upper-crust blue bloods like Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky and Kansas get invited to the marquee, neutral-site matchups against each other, and then they pony up the coin necessary to pad their non-conference home slates with cupcakes. Combined with an often brutal conference schedule, it leaves little incentive to invite tough opponents to their home gym, let alone travel to play them on their turf. UC tried to negotiate a home-and-home hoops series with Kentucky a few years ago, but the Wildcats insisted the Cincinnati tilt be hosted at U.S. Bank Arena rather than on-campus at Fifth Third. The Bearcats rebuffed.
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It’s always been the way to conference greatness and a reason, imo, why AAC football has so many ups and downs.
Patterson staying at TCU singe-handedly got them into the B12. When you have five or six of those guys in a conference you’re on your way to respectability. AAC is doing it right paying these guys. Let’s hope Hurley stays.
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Bravo for Cincy. Why should they move their home locale? Pff.