All things considered, Porter and Loyola did a great job on this year's schedule. When all schedules are released and everybody knows who is playing who, you'll see that Loyola's non-con schedule is better than about 55-70% of P5/Big East/American teams.
You won't find ANY P5 teams playing as many really good mid-major teams like St. Joes, Furman, Richmond, and Ball State. These are all teams that are likely to finish in the 70-150 range, making them dangerous and better than average teams. I would not be surprised, and almost expect us to go 3-1 against this group. You can add in Boston College as a team that will be near the top of this group, if we end up playing them, and Wyoming would be somewhere around 110 or so.
Nevada and Maryland are going to be in the top 10 and top 50 respectively.
That's 7 teams in the top 150 that Loyola will play among their 13 possible games. UIC could also make it into the top 150 with a good season. UMKC also has an outside chance with a young lineup.
Many P5s will rely only on the Q1 games they get from their own conference. Maybe they get one or two games against the top 25, but they're played mostly at neutral courts.
The way I figure it, our non-con schedule has 2 Q1s, 2 Q2s, 4 Q3s, and 4 Q4s. That's pretty solid. We should also get a Q1 at ISU. We might again end up having the most Q2 games of any team in the country.... like we did last year. Home against ISU, home and road against SIU, and road games against Bradley, Valpo, and UNI should be Q2 games, plus games in St. Louis.
We'll just need to make the case by winning them all, I guess.
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