Conference USA’s “bonus play” scheduling has received relatively little national attention since its installation last year. The concept, for those unfamiliar, is rather original: after the first 14 games of conference play, the last four games are scheduled, with teams 1st-5th in the standings playing one another in one round robin, teams 6th-10th in another, and the last four teams in their own (in which each plays one of the others twice, to keep the total number of conference games consistent). The end result is that teams who perform well over the first three quarters of league play are gifted with tougher schedules, boosting their strength of schedule number and adding quality opponents to their team sheets, thereby—in theory—assisting their case for bids to better postseason tournaments and higher seeds in the postseason tournaments that do take them.
It’s a funky idea, in that it isn’t being tried elsewhere, to my knowledge. It has its drawbacks, in that if conference tournament seeding is more important than NET ratings and similar metrics (and it is to most team’s NCAA Tournament chances), the sixth-place team at the beginning of bonus play is being rewarded relative to the fifth-place team (update: I have since learned that the teams are locked into their seeding range when bonus play begins, meaning the fifth-place team at the beginning of bonus play can be seeded no lower than fifth, negating my point here). It also may be counterproductive: a tougher schedule translates to more losses, and NET is harder to boost through scheduling alone than RPI was. Still, with the quadrant system in place on NCAA Tournament Selection Sheets, bonus play is doing a good job of overloading the left half (the stronger quadrants) of the team sheets of Conference USA’s best teams, specifically North Texas, Louisiana Tech, and Western Kentucky. Whether this makes any difference remains to be seen, and whether it made a difference last year is hard, at this point, to say. More research should be done. But at the very least, Conference USA is getting better games out of this deal, and they’re giving us a trial run of a concept that hasn’t really been seen since ESPN did BracketBusters—a concept that could have useful applications in other realms of collegiate sports (looking at you, Group of Five football).
Note: If you’re reading this, and you’re interested by it, you may be following our college basketball model. If so, please note that we have not yet input Conference USA’s bonus play games into the model. We expect that to be done prior to Thursday morning. So, for the time being, take projections related to C-USA with a grain of salt.
