I'm trying to learn a little more with each season I play HD.  I'm far from mastering anything yet, but I do think I've improved my approach to recruiting and player evaluation.

Now I need to work on my scheduling.  The past 2 seasons in D2, I padded my schedule with a bunch of cupcakes.  It beat going 2-25 and 4-23 like I did my first two seasons.  And while I didn't have the SOS/RPI to make the NT this past season, I did manage to raise my prestige a full letter just based on wins.

To be honest, I don't yet have the players to compete with the top 2 or 3 teams in my Lone Star conference.  I'm working on that, but meanwhile I want to figure out how to see a full season down the road and line up a schedule that is challenging without being a murderer's row of loss after loss.

I try looking at prospective opponents to see how many seniors they have - a good team this year will probably be rebuilding (or at least much weaker) by the time we play next season.   Frankly, there are a ton of prospective opponents and it would take literally hours to sift through them all.  This season I tried to just find one that I thought would be close to my level of competition next season and add them (knowing that I'm losing 5 seniors myself and will have a rebuilding job underway).

What's the best way to do this?  Does low prestige hurt your chances of seeing better opponents?  Is it best to focus on Sim AI or human opponents?  Do you shoot for teams that are stronger than you or relatively equal?

I personally try to always schedule as difficult as possible no matter what my prestige and outlook on the season is.

Many would disagree with me, but you see so many teams sneak into the post season with 12,13,14 wins because of a really hard SOS. If you pad your schedule with cupcakes you still put yourself in a position where you may have to win the CT just to make the post season. To me it is all about how do I get in the post season no matter how bad my team is and it is to try to pull off a few upsets in a really hard schedule.

This varies of course by your conference. If you are in something like ACC Allen or Upstate in Wooden then you can put a few more cupcakes on your schedule because your SOS and RPI will go up in conference play, the key though is remembering a loss to a good team can help your RPI more than a win against a bad team.

I currently have a C- prestige team in Allen that is 12-10, a few games ago I was in the 80s in RPI because of a tough OOC schedule (as tough as I could schedule with many top teams not wanting me on the schedule). My last 2 games were against awful sims including a 0 win team and my RPI came crashing back down, but because I challenged myself I at least was poking around at making the post season which would have been my first schools trip there in a long time. Next year I have a top 20 SOS schedule ready to go and expect to make the post season because of it.

If you don't want to kill yourself on schedule I think a good rule of thumb is schedule yourself 3 games you'll win almost everytime, 3-4 games that are a toss up and 3-4 games that you probably won't win but may pull off the upset.

I'd be interested to see other peoples opinions on this too though as I've been in several arguments about best way to schedule.

Also I noticed you scheduled all Sim teams for this past season. You should always aim for human teams even if you want to play weak teams. A human team is more likely to have more wins and a tougher SOS which will help your RPI. I would rather play a C- human team than a C- Sim team any day.

You can also look at a team's RPI from 4 years ago. They should have the same mix of players and you can get an idea of their potential RPI.  If the coach has changed,  it won't be as valid however.

It shouldn't take you hours to schedule. You don't need the perfect 10 opponents; just 10 that meet your general specifications

You can put together a very good RPI even with a sim-heavy schedule. You just have to make sure you're scheduling sims that are going to win a lot of games, and you also need to play them all on the road to take advantage of the RPI bonus for road wins.

you need to look at where your team stands - how good are you and what is your conference like.

a good general guide is that you want to try to set your team up so you think you have a good shot at winning 20 games - if you are in tough conference, that may mean that you want to play the toughest schedule you can where you think you can win 8 or 9 or 10 OOC games.  If you are in a weak conference filled with SIMs and weak human opponents, you may need to schedule tougher and some OOC losses are okay

SIMs are okay opponents, if they can be expected to have okay rpi - that is based on their opponents (which means a SIM in a good conference may be a good opponent) and their returning roster. 

humans are fine - but your overall wins need to hit the above targets

Road games get a bonus.  That does NOT mean all games should be road games, but I lean heavy toward road games against teams I think I have a good shot or a shot at beating

I agree with mjp8. I could win 2-3 games in my non-con and end up better than teams that go 10-0 and play ten simAI schools. Losing to a top 20 rpi school generally either helps you or has no impact (depending on your talent), and beating a 200+ rpi school never helps. So there are good losses and bad wins.

Your opponents' winning percentage is far more important than your opponents' RPI, when it comes to getting a strong RPI out of your non-conf schedule. A lot of people mistakenly think that scheduling a middling or bottom team from a really strong conference will help their RPI, but I'd much prefer to play a sim (or human, for that matter) team that will win 20+ games against weak opposition. RPI is 25% your winning percentage, 50%  your opponents' winning percentage and 25% your opponents opponents winning percentage. So how many games your opponent will win is twice as important as how tough their schedule is.

Posted by professor17 on 4/14/2011 6:26:00 PM (view original):
Your opponents' winning percentage is far more important than your opponents' RPI, when it comes to getting a strong RPI out of your non-conf schedule. A lot of people mistakenly think that scheduling a middling or bottom team from a really strong conference will help their RPI, but I'd much prefer to play a sim (or human, for that matter) team that will win 20+ games against weak opposition. RPI is 25% your winning percentage, 50%  your opponents' winning percentage and 25% your opponents opponents winning percentage. So how many games your opponent will win is twice as important as how tough their schedule is.

+1

Posted by professor17 on 4/14/2011 6:26:00 PM (view original):
Your opponents' winning percentage is far more important than your opponents' RPI, when it comes to getting a strong RPI out of your non-conf schedule. A lot of people mistakenly think that scheduling a middling or bottom team from a really strong conference will help their RPI, but I'd much prefer to play a sim (or human, for that matter) team that will win 20+ games against weak opposition. RPI is 25% your winning percentage, 50%  your opponents' winning percentage and 25% your opponents opponents winning percentage. So how many games your opponent will win is twice as important as how tough their schedule is.

Thanks for all the input, you guys.  You've given me a lot to think about as I look ahead to this next season.

Professor17, when you say you prefer to play a team that will win 20+ games, how do you determine that?  Digging through their past season's schedule and looking at returning players?

How much do you all regard a potential opponents' prestige when scheduling?  Does it help RPI or is it a non-factor?
 

Posted by professor17 on 4/14/2011 6:26:00 PM (view original):
Your opponents' winning percentage is far more important than your opponents' RPI, when it comes to getting a strong RPI out of your non-conf schedule. A lot of people mistakenly think that scheduling a middling or bottom team from a really strong conference will help their RPI, but I'd much prefer to play a sim (or human, for that matter) team that will win 20+ games against weak opposition. RPI is 25% your winning percentage, 50%  your opponents' winning percentage and 25% your opponents opponents winning percentage. So how many games your opponent will win is twice as important as how tough their schedule is.

I generally agree here, but what I've often thought about is whether a 13-13 Big 6 team w/a real coach can even out with a 19-7 SIM team due to the  last 25% (from the opp. opp. win %).  IN other words, the Big 6 team may have a mediocr recorde, but he probably plays a MUCH tougher schedule, so would that make up for less wins than the cupcake Sim team that simply wins more games but plays other crappy sim teams and ends up with an SOS in the bottom 2 deciles?  My gut says you're still right to play the SIM teams, but I'd like to crunch some numbers...and just never have.  Anyhow, this is why I like to schedule the top human-coached teams in lesser conferences.  Kind of the best of both worlds if your team can go 6-4 vs. them or better....imo of course

Posted by jdno on 4/14/2011 7:43:00 PM (view original):

Posted by professor17 on 4/14/2011 6:26:00 PM (view original):
Your opponents' winning percentage is far more important than your opponents' RPI, when it comes to getting a strong RPI out of your non-conf schedule. A lot of people mistakenly think that scheduling a middling or bottom team from a really strong conference will help their RPI, but I'd much prefer to play a sim (or human, for that matter) team that will win 20+ games against weak opposition. RPI is 25% your winning percentage, 50%  your opponents' winning percentage and 25% your opponents opponents winning percentage. So how many games your opponent will win is twice as important as how tough their schedule is.

I generally agree here, but what I've often thought about is whether a 13-13 Big 6 team w/a real coach can even out with a 19-7 SIM team due to the  last 25% (from the opp. opp. win %).  IN other words, the Big 6 team may have a mediocr recorde, but he probably plays a MUCH tougher schedule, so would that make up for less wins than the cupcake Sim team that simply wins more games but plays other crappy sim teams and ends up with an SOS in the bottom 2 deciles?  My gut says you're still right to play the SIM teams, but I'd like to crunch some numbers...and just never have.  Anyhow, this is why I like to schedule the top human-coached teams in lesser conferences.  Kind of the best of both worlds if your team can go 6-4 vs. them or better....imo of course

jdno,

First, I agree about playing lone-human type teams from lower conferences. That's an excellent way to get an RPI boost, especially if you're an elite-level Big 6 team that is sure of winning the vast majority of those type of matchups.

Regarding running the numbers on playing a .500 Big 6 team vs. a 19-7 sim team, I just did a quick example from Knight, which recently completed their latest season.

I took the worst-RPI 20-win team I could find (which happened to be coached by a human): Texas Southern, 20-8 record (.7143), and the 306th rated SOS (.5091). I compared them to the highest RPI Big 6 team that was within a game of .500. That turned out to be Georgetown: 16-15 record (.5161), and the 28th rated SOS (.5901).

If we take 0.5 times the opponent's record and 0.25 times the SOS, we get a value of .4844 for Texas Southern and .4056 for Georgetown. Not even close. Playing Texas Southern and their 306th rated SOS is far better for your RPI than playing Georgetown.

In short - by the end of the regular season your RPI and SOS should be in the same ballbark.

Good stuff professor

Professor, good example, thanks.  But shouldn't we be multiplying the OOWP by 25% instead of SOS by 25% as I think you've done?  Getting the right OOWP is what would be tedious.  And then I can't remember if the home and away multipliers factor in for OWP and OOWP.  I know it was discussed recently on the board, but I already forget what the conclusion was.