Out of conference scheduling

[novafan14]

Really enjoying the game thus far. I've started out at a small school with low prestige and I'm surprised that when I'm doing my schedule for the first year (and second year now) that I'm able to schedule much higher power conference teams to come play at my home court. I would expect that a team from one of the power conferences that has a few stars higher prestige than mine would only want to play me at their home court. In my case, I am Stony Brook and I was able to pick from the likes of Clemson, Tenneesee, and a few other teams in the 3-3.5 star prestige range to play me at my home court. I've noticed this on the past few versions of the game too and it isn't a big deal but just thought it was a little unrealistic. I know in real life it is extremely rare for something like this to happen. Again, great game, just thought I'd bring it up as a discussion point. Thanks!

[23Zone]

Yeah I have noticed this as well. Since the game auto schedules this way for all teams, it kind of tends to skew the records of some of the higher level teams because of home court advantage that the smaller schools get. Its not unusual in real life for a major conference team to play almost all of their pre-conference games at home against lower level teams with maybe a couple of neutral site games with other major conference teams and in tournaments.

In the game I frequently see things like Duke playing a road game at Wright State or Kentucky to play a road game at East Tennessee St... both games you would seldom if ever see in real life. It seems that some major conference teams have 4 or 5 such games in a year in the game which really skews their pre-conference records especially if they are a lower rung team in a major conference (Oregon St, Vanderbilt, Depaul, etc... seem to be frequent victims in my leagues). These teams just continue to sink lower and lower as their record suffers from more losing and their prestige takes a dive.... whereas in real life they would likely consistently schedule a bunch of easy teams at home to keep the record good so they could qualify for end of season tournaments and then the prestige would not suffer so much... just my 2 cents.

[Gary Gorski]

Are you talking about scheduling in general or just who is available for you to change opponents on when deciding your schedule? I ran a league looking at what teams would be available to me with a low prestige school and there were no even decent teams I could switch up to get to play me at home

[novafan14]

Are you talking about scheduling in general or just who is available for you to change opponents on when deciding your schedule? I ran a league looking at what teams would be available to me with a low prestige school and there were no even decent teams I could switch up to get to play me at home

I've noticed it happens in both cases. For example in year 2 of my save, Oregon State's CPU generated schedule (Pac 12 Conference, prestige = 45, 2-1/2 stars) has them playing at Rider (Metro Atlantic Conference, Prestige = 13, 1 star), at Delaware St (Mid-Eastern Conference, Prestige = 14, 1 star) and at St. Francis PA (Northeast Conference, Prestige = 17, 1 star). Other CPU scheduling examples in my current save include Vanderbilt in SEC playing at Jacksonville, Eastern Illinois, and Columbia; Virginia Tech in ACC playing at Siena, at Stephen F Austin, and at North Dakota State. For choosing the out of conference games for my Stony Brook team (Prestige = 19), I was able to pick from the likes of Clemson in ACC, Tennessee in SEC, and CAL from PAC 12 (all of whom have a prestige around 50) to come play at my home court.

After taking a closer look, it looks like most of the major conference teams schedules are reasonable but there are definitely a few teams from each of the power conferences whose schedules appear to have these unusual away games at small non-power conference schools. Like I said, I don't think it is a major deal, just something that caught my attention as being a little unrealistic compared to real life and perhaps could use some attention on future updates.

[Gary Gorski]

I'm surprised you can see it when doing your own schedule because I just looked at that code and it shouldn't be possible. I will look into what the computer is doing behind the scenes but if you run into it when setting your schedule look under the help menu in the game and follow the instructions to send in the game files please so we can look

[novafan14]

I'm surprised you can see it when doing your own schedule because I just looked at that code and it shouldn't be possible. I will look into what the computer is doing behind the scenes but if you run into it when setting your schedule look under the help menu in the game and follow the instructions to send in the game files please so we can look

Sent, thanks!