After the debacle of this year's schedule, now is the time to start working on 2015-16. Yes, right now-- forget about trying to figure out where we might be for the season following this uncertain upcoming season. It's not like there's a chance we'll be taking 2015-16 off, and the choices are better the sooner someone starts working on it. This business of hastily slapping together the schedule in late August and repeatedly being the last in the league to come out with any firm schedule information has got to end.

Just yesterday, there were nine messages on the Basketball Travelers site trying to set up games for 2015-16. Illinois State and Drake have already posted messages seeking to set up their 2015-16 schedule; UIC and St. Louis have posted messages. Just since September 3, there have been 39 postings about 2015-16, and a lot of them are really intriguing:

- A home and home with LaSalle, with the Philly game played at the Palestra.
- A buy game at Missouri on Dec. 5, 2015.
- A game with Kansas State at Intrust in Wichita, with a return at a nearby neutral.
- A guarantee game to open 2015-16 at Richmond, or a home and home starting next year in Richmond.
- Louisiana-Lafayette looking to start a home and home on the road.

In 2015-16, Milton Doyle will be a junior; White, Turk, James, and Peterson will be seniors; Ingram, Knuth, Rajala, and Richardson will be sophomores. With a couple of impact freshmen or jucos, there's an opportunity to have a pretty good season in 2015-16. It would be a shame to come up with another stink-pile of a schedule like this year's to ruin or undermine a chance to turn a big corner with the program. And there is a clear, unmistakable incentive to come up with a better schedule, because schedule strength is a tiebreaker in MVC tournament seeding.

More than just getting better matchups, better quality, and better situations, constructing the schedule in a professional and proactive manner is a reflection of simple competence. I was making several posts early last winter about getting going with a good schedule for 2014-15, and evidently it was either completely ignored or deliberately disregarded. Who knows why, but whether it was inexperience, expediency, incompetence, inattentiveness, a void in the academic administration, or relying on wishful thinking, the 2014-15 schedule is crap, and needlessly so. The women's basketball, men's soccer, and women's soccer programs came out with excellent to really good schedules for this year, and women's volleyball was somewhat solid. All of them were pretty significant improvements over last year. Only men's basketball was a dud. At some point you have to figure that the correllation between uninspired/slap-dash scheduling and last-place finishes in men's basketball is more than just "coincidence."

UIC is I believe a four game series, so we will host them next year and go to the Pavilion in 2016.

SLU makes WAY too much sense to schedule so I have zero faith in Porter to get it done. I could see not wanting to play them in year 1 or 2 because they were good and he recruited them all. He'll be 5 years removed from SLU next year so all of the recruits that he and Majerus brought in are gone.

LaSalle offering a home and home at the Palestra? Helloooooooo Grace Calhoun!!

I would love a Mizzou buy game, especially on a Saturday. SEC Network, somewhat nice road trip drive of 7-8 hours. I like it a lot better than playing K-State in a town that we already play in. I'm also on record saying that I'm not opposed to playing multiple buy games. We could use the money (especially if it's something like MSU which paid us over 80/90k in the past) and we could use the stronger/tougher schedule to recruit better players and improve the players we already have. I'd rather have 5 buy games on the schedule (not ideal, but I don't think we're in a position to be bargaining for 2 for 1s or home & homes from the big boys yet) than 2 games against D2 schools.

I don't love a Richmond 2 for 1. It might sound snobbish, but I don't think they're big enough to offer us a guarantee that would make sense to us. I'd rather take the home/home against ULL. We could use more home and homes against other mid-majors as well.

A we STILL do not have an AD to aid in this scheduling situation. All this nonsense MUST stop. Just an example--My Lunch gang represent Notre Dame, St Louis University , Va Tech and occasionally a Dayton Guy.--They are getting kinda sick of hearing about 1963 and 1985 and prior years.
OH ! BTW I received my LUC Varsity Club envelope right on time.

This truly is getting OLD !

C'mon RAMBLERS !!!

I brought up St. Louis and UIC (along with Drake and Illinois State) to show that they're already actively and aggressively working on their 2015-16 schedules. If you compare this year's UIC and St. Louis schedules to ours, you can see that they're both superior to what we got. UIC's isn't a whole lot better, but it is still marginally better than ours-- they play us at home, plus Western Illinois, Central Florida, and Grand Canyon; their road games are at Kent State, Dayton, SMU, Northwestern, and Bradley. St. Louis plays Vanderbilt, Vermont, and South Dakota State at home-- all of them with RPIs better than 143 last year-- and their only two true road games are at Wichita State and Indiana State.

Meanwhile, we're playing true road games against two 300+ RPI teams, one at 212, and one at Michigan State; apart from the buy game in East Lansing, the biggest "name" on our non-con schedule is probably Texas Tech (at a neutral site, which does us no good with building attendance). We'll have 0 home games against teams with RPIs above 224, and only two games on the entire non-con schedule against teams between 17 and 212. We should be trying to schedule ALL our games against teams between 17-212, not just two out of 12. And we should be able to get at least one decent RPI or "name" team to play us at home. Barring significantly better than expected seasons from Tulane, Jackson State or the two MTE teams we play at home this year, we will have played exactly two non-con home games in the past three years against teams with RPIs above 200: Toledo in 2012 (RPI 193) and Milwaukee last year (134).

Hell, add to that list Fairfield. I'd much rather have them than UT San Antonio.

It also looks like St. Bonaventure is looking for games. Why not them?

I'll tell you why not. Porter is straight trying to save his job by scheduling the Little Sisters of the Poor. It's going to bite him right in the ass and we're going to be looking for a new coach.

_________________
Cigarboy sucks!

Playing only two non-con home games against teams with better than 200 RPIs over the past three years has really killed us from a strength of schedule and attendance aspect. Who is going to get excited about wins over a team that won ONE game against a D-1 opponent last year (Southern Utah), two non-D1 teams, and an 11-20 team from the SWAC (Jackson State)? Worse, the two teams in the past three years that DID have RPIs better than 200 weren't really expected to do so, and we still managed to beat them both-- if we scheduled more of those games at home, we'd likely win the majority of them.

I'd rather have six home games every year against 200 RPI or higher teams and go .500 against them than sweep the home schedule of Rockhurst, McKendree, Jackson State, Tulane, Abilene Christian, and Southern Utah. We shouldn't EVER have to play a road game against a team below 250 in the RPI, even when they're having a down year-- yet this year we're playing at a 317 and a 308.

At home last year, the teams we beat had RPIs of 93, 112, 133, 134, 316, and 317. At neutral sites, we beat 264 and 318. We didn't win a single true road game last year, despite having double-digit leads in the second half of several games (Tulane, Tennessee Tech, Portland State).

Beating Rockhurst or McKendree by 30, 50, or 350 gets us NOTHING. People aren't going to come out to those meaningless games, and it doesn't count in our RPI. Starters probably don't play their normal rotations and minutes. Winning by 2 or by 72 at home against Abilene Christian doesn't make a difference. When we haven't won a true road game for a year and a half, why would you schedule a team with a 308 RPI like Texas-San Antonio? Yes, we probably have a good chance of winning, but the same thing was true in our losses last year at #255 Portland State and at a neutral site against #323 UC Davis. We also lost at home to #217 Northern Illinois. C'mon, get sensible and look at the data!!!

Agree with you, 63. I don't know the inner workings of scheduling but imagine a lot of work gets done early. Was thinking about it a bit...remember back in '06-'07 when we were OT away from the conf championship with a legit shot at the tourney? Check out the schedule from that year: http://www.loyolaramblers.com/sports/m- ... -2006.html

Great tourney to start. Princeton was a solid Ivy League and Ohio State really showed us what our flaws were and where we needed to improve (same with Purdue). Look at the other non-con games that year! Granted Bradley and N Iowa are conference foes now, but they were great games at the time. That schedule looks great right about now, even with 2 non-D1s. Can we be selfish enough to hope for something along these lines?

Memory lane...John Carroll game that year was actually very neat for me. My dad played there and a lot of his old teammates came. One of them had a son that was playing for JCU as well. It was neat that they were able to reunite after over 30 years.

That St. Louis game at home was a killer... We were a few seconds and a turnover away from winning that one in front of a big crowd. Maybe we should have scheduled Lower Coastal South Carolina instead.

I remember it well, and that was a big disappointment. Vouyoukas or however it's spelled was a beast. I think we led by 10 or 12 midway through the first half but it was back and forth the whole second half.