Does anyone know if the B1G has ever considered doing a protected home and home matchup in the conference schedule? As with football, where they have fixed one cross divisional matchup for the 6 year cycle (MSU for us), and cycle through the other 6 teams home once then away once every 3 years, they could do one fixed team that you play twice every year.
I say this mostly cause, while NU Illinois isn't exactly a big rivalry in basketball, people do get a bit more pumped up for it. I would think having a home and home with them every year would only be good for the conference. And there's no reason that Indiana shouldn't play Purdue twice each season in my opinion. Sure you could argue this might tilt the conference SOS a bit in one direction or the other, but it's going to end up unbalanced every year anyways, and with how the committee chooses teams based on holistic resume, most of the good teams don't mind having an extra quality opponent on the schedule (see Tom Izzo's scheduling strategy).
I might swap from the football rivalry weekend schedule to make it Mich-MSU and OSU-PSU for bball purposes. And also could consider doing Wisconsin-Iowa, which would leave Minnesota-Nebraska as the other. I guess Maryland gets the pleasure of beating up on Rutgers twice a year, though actually you could improve that a bit by matching Maryland up with OSU and leaving PSU against Rutgers.
Thoughts? Am I crazy, or has this idea already been considered and discarded?
I say this mostly cause, while NU Illinois isn't exactly a big rivalry in basketball, people do get a bit more pumped up for it. I would think having a home and home with them every year would only be good for the conference. And there's no reason that Indiana shouldn't play Purdue twice each season in my opinion. Sure you could argue this might tilt the conference SOS a bit in one direction or the other, but it's going to end up unbalanced every year anyways, and with how the committee chooses teams based on holistic resume, most of the good teams don't mind having an extra quality opponent on the schedule (see Tom Izzo's scheduling strategy).
I might swap from the football rivalry weekend schedule to make it Mich-MSU and OSU-PSU for bball purposes. And also could consider doing Wisconsin-Iowa, which would leave Minnesota-Nebraska as the other. I guess Maryland gets the pleasure of beating up on Rutgers twice a year, though actually you could improve that a bit by matching Maryland up with OSU and leaving PSU against Rutgers.
Thoughts? Am I crazy, or has this idea already been considered and discarded?
