A few seasons ago I took over a terrible D- team in D1 Wooden in an attempt to try to turn them around. My first few seasons I made the mistake of scheduling the way I scheduled when I had good teams and wound up with very few wins.

Last season I scheduled true pattycakes and wound up going 9-1 OOC and since I had a senior led team also went 15-1 in conference before blowing it in the CT and making the PIT. That still was god enough to boost me up to a C- however.

This year especially since I have a very young team I took the same approach of a terrible schedule just to stock pile wins. My question is how long does that work at low level D1? At what point will just stockpiling easy wins stop working to boost my prestige? My goal is not to make the NT right now with this team, but just to try to see a prestige boost.

How many seasons would you take that approach, or at what point would you start scheduling tougher games in an interest of boosting RPI and SOS even in a loss? My team is young this season so I don't expect much but I'd be happy with a 17-20 win season with a terrible SOS and hope that might boost me to a C. 

Should I start next year with more human controlled mid major games? Tougher teams that aren't layups but also aren't top 25 style teams, or can I benefit again with another weak schedule and just stocking wins. Obviously in the conference I'm in we are going to be a 1 bid league most seasons, we are improving and could see ourselves earning extra bids soon, but for now winning the CT is the only way in for most of us besides maybe 1 team so the NT isn't necessarily my main goal. My main goal is prestige bumps so I can bring in better players and compete with the top teams in our conference (and out of it).

So how would you schedule in the situation of just starting to improve but still not that good?

At what point will just stockpiling easy wins stop working to boost my prestige?

I'd like to know the answer to this question too.

I have a DI team with a lower prestige myself and would like to build it up. I haven't given myself an easy schedule to pile up wins, but have rather tried to schedule teams which are roughly equal in ability to my own with a few who are a bit more difficult in an attempt to create a challenge. Perhaps I should use the "pile up wins" strategy if it will boost prestige and help me overall.

With prestige anywhere in the D range, I would schedule easy and go for 20+ wins (and still have a chance to make the NT in what I assume is a very weak conference). Once you're in the C range, you generally need to make the postseason to improve on your prestige (perhaps not always, but generally), so I think you have to take the schedule up a notch. mjp, if I were you, I'd go with a mix of solid-but-still beatable human teams and sims that should be strong (i.e. no really crappy sims). The sims that you're scheduling are bottom of the barrel and I wouldn't include anyone like that from now on.

Thanks girt,

I specifically went bottom of the barrel this year because I was graduating 5 seniors and knew I would be a bottom of the barrel D1 team too. I didn't want to fall too far from the C- prestige I had gotten up to so scheduled myself 7+ easy OOC wins.