MBB: NEWMAC

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There's nobody in the NEWMAC who shies away from competition.  Maybe CGA, Emerson, and Salve could do a little better, but they're not dragging anybody down.  The teams need to be good enough to win some of those games, but you've got a lot of serious programs and serious coaches.  I don't think it'll be an issue for NPI.

In strict NPI terms, if you go 0-5 in your toughest non-conference games, you over-scheduled. If you go 5-0, you may have under-scheduled. A conference's at-large chances really comes down to each team in the league being able to find and perform at their sweet spot waaaaay more than whether a conference schedule is 14 or 16 or 18 games.

I just think that as the number of conference games increase and as the number of non-conference (discretionary) games decrease the overall strength of the conference can play a big factor, good or bad.  And the overall strength of the conference can be measured by how well you do in those discretionary games, which are ideally against reasonably good teams.  If too many teams within the conference find their sweet spot in the 225+ rankings they'd better do well in those games.

Right, a conference game is by definition a .500 outcome for the league as a whole whereas two teams playing non-conference games could go 1.000 (or 0.000). Playing fewer non-conference games would be a positive for a conference that would otherwise aggregate a below .500 mark in those games and a negative for a conference whose teams would combine to go better than .500.

Regardless of the number, at-large chances really come down to having a depth of teams that can stack up as many wins as possible against as good of competition as they can get them. *Almost* any win is better than any loss.

It's in a team and conferences best interest to have all non-conference schedules tuned to the appropriate level to balance risk and reward.