Atlantic 10 Conference basketball: Non-conference scheduling always a challenge

The topic of non-conference scheduling comes up every year at Atlantic 10 Conference Media Day.

Dayton Flyers fans know that discussion well. UD Athletic Director Neil Sullivan talks about scheduling every year with the Dayton Daily News.

In June 2019, before a season that would see Dayton win 29 games, Sullivan said, “It is the most difficult scheduling environment I’ve been involved with since I’ve been here, since 2006. We have just been soundly rejected by what I would say are other NCAA at-large contending teams: from the Power 5, from the Big East.”

Dayton played Georgia, Virginia Tech and Kansas in the Maui Invitational that season. It played Saint Mary’s and Colorado on neutral courts. The highest-ranked team to play a non-conference game at UD Arena was North Texas, which finished No. 77 in the Ken Pomeroy ratings.

That was only six years ago, but the schedules Dayton has played in recent seasons make it seem much longer ago.

Dayton had the 54th-best non-conference schedule in the country last season. That doesn’t seem impressive until you compare it to the rest of the A-10. The second-best non-conference schedule, ranked 185th, belonged to Saint Louis. No one else ranked in the top 200. A-10 champion Virginia Commonwealth’s schedule ranked 293rd.

“Our goal is to strike the right balance among a lot of competing priorities,” Sullivan said last summer. “Hopefully, that’s how it shakes out for us. It’s a balancing act. We’re constantly forecasting and rolling the dice, trying to align these priorities. We have to have a resume that appeals to the selection committee. That’s the most important thing. We want to deliver compelling, valuable matchups to our season-ticket holders. And we want to have matchups that are relevant for national television. Those are the priorities. Of course, we have to have home games to pay our bills.”

Dayton was supposed to have the best non-conference schedule in the A-10 again this season. In November, Dayton played two Big 12 teams (Cincinnati and Brigham Young) and two Big East teams (Marquette and Georgetown). In December, it plays two Atlantic Coast Conference teams (Virginia and Florida State) and the top Conference USA team (Liberty).

Entering the season, at least on paper, Dayton had the best non-conference schedule in the A-10.

November results changed that thinking. Dayton ranked 88th in the first NCAA Evaluation Tool release on Dec. 1. It was the sixth-highest-ranked A-10 team with a non-conference strength of schedule that ranked 221st. The struggles of Cincinnati (5-2 in November with a loss to Eastern Michigan at home) and Marquette (4-4 in November) damaged Dayton’s schedule ranking.

While the NET numbers likely will change dramatically in the months ahead, in early December, the best schedule belonged to defending A-10 champion Virginia Commonwealth. VCU ranked No. 57 in the NET on Dec. 1 and had the 30th-best non-conference schedule in the nation.

VCU’s schedule included November games against five teams ranked in the top 100 of the NET: No. 20 Utah State; No. 42 North Carolina State; No. 77 South Florida; No. 4 Vanderbilt; and No. 82 Virginia Tech. It finished 2-3 against those five teams.

Rhode Island, No. 65 in the NET, had the 138th-ranked schedule and the second-best A-10 schedule. It played No. 35 Tulsa and No. 25 Yale

The top non-conference opponent in November for Saint Louis, picked to finish second in the A-10, was Santa Clara, which ranked 36th in the NET on Dec. 1. The Billikens won that game 71-70.

George Washington, picked to finish fourth, played three top-100 teams in November (No. 77 South Florida, No. 99 Murray State and No. 61 McNeese State). The Revolutionaries play their biggest game in December against No. 31 Florida.

A-10 teams will once again have to make the most of limited opportunities to build a NCAA tournament resume in non-conference play. In the last three seasons, only the 2023-24 Dayton Flyers have done that. In 2023 and 2025, only the A-10 tournament champion played in the NCAA tournament.

As the calendar turned from November to December, NCAA tournament expert Joe Lunardi had no A-10 at-large teams in his 2026 bracket forecast, though he had VCU on the bubble listed among the “First Four Out.”

A-10 Commissioner Bernadette V. McGlade talked about the scheduling challenges at Media Day in Pittsburgh on Sept. 30. The league had a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West Conference for the 2020-21 season. Dayton was scheduled to play Nevada, for example. The pandemic disrupted scheduling that season. The agreement fell apart.

McGlade said the A-10 has discussed other agreements, such as getting together with multiple conferences with four teams from each conference playing. She said it’s important to get creative.

“We have to have strong non-conference schedules,” McGlade said, “and you have to win those games. You have to get them on your schedules to start with.”

The evolution of multi-team events has also made scheduling difficult. Some teams, like Dayton, played two games instead of the normal three in November tournaments. Dayton beat Georgetown and lost to Brigham Young in the ESPN Events Invitational this season.

VCU, on the other hand, did get three games in the Battle 4 Atlantis. George Mason played three games in the Cayman Islands Classic. Rhode Island also played three games in the eight-team bracket at the ESPN Events Invitational.

“We relied heavily on MTEs,” McGlade said. “I think we have every single team in an MTE this year, but the makeup of those are changing a little bit, so we are looking at some other creative ways to at least build a scheduling alliance or two.”

A number of A-10 coaches answered questions about their scheduling philosophies at A-10 Media Day. Here’s what they had to say.

Anthony Grant, Dayton: First and foremost, I think Neil and assistant coaches do a great job in terms of taking advantage of some of the relationships that we’ve been able to establish over the years in the business. I think, obviously the other part of it is, we’ve been able to put ourselves in a position where other teams can look at playing Dayton and hopefully understand that it’s a good game for them to play. It’s not going to be something that people will look at, whether it’s a win or a loss, as something that will damage your goals. I think that’s a credit to the teams that have come before, the team that we currently have and some of the success that we have built. That’s really what we’re trying to establish and maintain.

Josh Schertz, Saint Louis: I think we have to continue to push the needle forward. Certainly, there’s no question that Dayton has set the standard in terms of non-conference scheduling. There’s a lot that goes into that, but the biggest thing is what Dayton’s been able to accomplish over a long period of time has given them cachet. They’ve been able to get those high-major games and true home-and-home series.

You’ve got to play good games. You’ve got to play as many of them as is feasible. There’s a needle to thread to build your NET (rating) into what it needs to be. Certainly, playing really good Quad 1 and Quad 2 games and then taking care of your business in the other games is the needle to thread. But we need to continue to look at ways we can improve.

We’re finishing up home-and-homes this season. We’ll welcome in San Francisco and Grand Canyon. We would have had Santa Clara coming as well. There was kind of a snafu with the MTE (they played at a neutral site instead). We would have had three top-80 teams in the country coming to Chaifetz (Arena) this year. We want to continue to look at opportunities to build our schedule.

I think I’m aligned with (AD Chris May) on this. You want two bites at the apple. One bite at the apple is to get into the tournament with an at-large bid. The second bite of the apple is being in position to compete for the conference tournament championship. We want to get as good a bite at both of those as we possibly can. You want to give yourself the best opportunity.

Phil Martelli Jr., Virginia Commonwealth: (Scheduling) is very difficult, especially from the standpoint of trying to play the toughest schedule. Everyone has different levels, right? There’s some that are not trying to do that. We are trying to do that.

I believe in testing yourself against the best. The problem is the best don’t really want to do that. That’s the unfortunate part. It takes two parties to agree on it. We’ve gone back and forth with some power- conference schools. It just made sense until it didn’t make sense, and those are the opportunities we’re looking for. So whether it’s neutral sites, home and homes, any other creative way we can get them on the schedule, we’ll do it. We’re here. We’re willing to play. But, yeah, it’s very difficult.

Mark Schmidt, St. Bonaventure: We want to have some games that we can win. We’re going to have some games that are going to be 50-50. Then we’re going to take a couple like North Carolina — we shouldn’t beat North Carolina, but I think that’s a good game. If we lose, it’s not going to hurt us. We’re trying to schedule to prepare us for the Atlantic 10, but we’re trying to schedule where if we have a good year, it gives us a possibility to be an at-large team.

Drew Valentine, Loyola Chicago: We want to try to play as many high-level, competitive games as possible. We want to try to have four to five buy games a year. We want to try to play, outside of that, home-and-home series against high-level competition or neutral-site games, whether that’s through a MTE (multi-team event), or whether that’s doing what we’re doing this year with North Texas, or playing San Francisco at the Chase Center, or playing Santa Clara at the G League arena for the Warriors in Santa Cruz.

We started a home-and-home series with Wichita State and Colorado State. Hopefully, we can continue to get more home-and-home series because I think Gentile Arena is an amazing home atmosphere and environment. The more people that come in there, people start to see that they want to play more games there in Chicago.

Matt McKillop, Davidson: We’ve got a great schedule. We’ve been really lucky to play in really good MTEs. We were in the cycle of playing in the ESPN Events, the Myrtle Beach Invitational and the Charleston Classic, which we’re in again this year. We played in the Diamond Head Classic and the Battle 4 Atlantis. We played in the Maui Invitational when it was held in Asheville, N.C., during COVID. That would always be three games, and you’re usually getting Quad 1 or Quad 2 games. Usually, you’re playing against a powerful opponent.

Our philosophy is really just to get the best games we can get. We put it all on a board. We have the games mapped out the way we want. This is when we want to play a home game. This is when we’re willing to go on the road or start a series. It never comes together the way you lay it all out to begin with.

Chris Mooney, Richmond: It’s funny, I keep notes on my phone. I keep all the schedules we’ve had over the years as a reference. I do it as we’re scheduling teams. We’ve averaged between three and five high major games a year, whether that’s in a tournament or just being bought (and playing on the road). That’s always our first priority. We try to do that first, so then we can fill in the games around that.Now recently we just have not been able to do that. I know Dayton has a tremendous schedule. They seem to be the outlier."

Dayton’s non-conference schedules ranked

According to KenPom.com

2024-25: 54.

2023-24: 36.

2022-23: 227.

2021-22: 215.

2020-21: 148.

2019-20: 203.

2018-19: 114.

2017-18: 118.

2016-17: 77.

2015-16: 91.