Alex Hausladen had his schedule finished by Memorial Day. There was still some paperwork left to be signed — there always is. But all 13 of Texas State’s non-conference games had been agreed to with the season due to start on Nov. 10.
But on Sept. 16, the NCAA Division I Council approved to push the start of the 2020-21 season back 15 days. The reasoning was that Nov. 25 would be a day in which a large majority of schools would have concluded their fall semesters or moved their courses online, reducing the risk of exposure of COVID-19 between basketball players and the student body population.
In addition, the maximum number of regular season games a team was allowed to play was reduced. Men’s teams could play in a total of 25 regular season games plus a two-game multi-team event (MTE), or 24 games plus a three-game MTE. Women’s teams could play 23 games plus a four-game MTE, or 25 games with no MTE.
The non-conference lineups that Hausladen and hundreds of other schedulers crafted were all lit on fire. Each team had to start over from scratch again with mere weeks to do what typically takes over a year.
“Scheduling is like putting together a puzzle. But somebody else is putting together a puzzle, too,” said Hausladen, the Texas State Men’s Basketball Director of Operations. “You share a piece. They can’t see your puzzle and you can’t see their puzzle. But you have to both put together your puzzles. And then raise that by a factor of 300. That’s Division I scheduling.”
Basketball teams typically begin piecing together their schedules about a year or two ahead of time. When the regular season ends in March, Texas State’s schedule-makers are already reaching out to other schools about available dates for the next season.
After the NCAA effectively chopped off the first two weeks of the 2020-21 season, seven of the 13 games Hausladen scheduled were either canceled or moved to a different date. The Bobcats didn’t release their official non-conference lineup until Nov. 11.
“There were actually six games during that time frame (that were affected),” said Nathan Teymer, an assistant coach and scheduler for Texas State Women’s Basketball. “So what we had to do was — we couldn’t make up four of them because we went from 29 (regular season games) to 25. But then the other two, we had to put in December.”
Scheduling is not like playing Dynasty Mode on NCAA Basketball 10; you do not go to the “Customize Schedule” menu and load up on Power 5 after Power 5 team until the video game says you have a five-star slate. It’s a surefire way to miss the NCAA tournament in real life.
Instead, Hausladen and Teymer focus on scheduling wins — finding teams whose strengths the Bobcats could hypothetically neutralize and whose weaknesses the maroon and gold could take advantage of.
Hours of research go into preliminary scouting reports on potential opponents. Coaches look at everything from the roster to the analytics to the pace of play of a team. For one high major school the Texas State men’s team is scheduled to play this year, Hausladen said he watched four games of film to get a feel for how the Bobcats would match up.
“You could see three teams that are of relatively similar strength. But depending on what their strengths are compared to your strengths, one team might be an opponent that you feel like you have some advantages over, one team might be a very neutral opponent and one team might be able to exploit your weaknesses better,” Hausladen said. “So it’s not necessarily the strength of the opponent. Sometimes it’s more of how their strengths compare to yours.”
Texas State still has needs to meet, though, which come first and foremost. Being a mid-major program, the Bobcats have to play in a few “guarantee” or “buy” games every season in which their opponents, usually high-major teams, pay a large amount of money to host Texas State. Andy Wittry of AthleticDirectorU found that the average buy game in men’s college basketball during the 2019-20 season was worth $90,000.
Those funds typically go toward a team’s traveling costs. But getting those funds could mean playing against an opponent your team has little shot of winning against.
Deep-pocketed high major programs rarely need to play guarantee games, which makes it difficult to ever secure a meeting with one on your own court. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reaching out, which Hausladen says he does with every high major school in the state of Texas every year. The last time Texas State’s basketball teams hosted Power 5 opponents came in 2012, when the women’s team faced TCU on Nov. 25 and the men’s team faced Utah on Nov. 30. But those programs can afford to be much more selective in choosing their opponents.
“In men’s basketball, because of the nature of it, unless you have a specific draw for them, it doesn’t make a lot of economic sense for them to do it,” Hausladen said. “They can pay schools 70, 80, 90, $100,000, but they sell those games as part of their season ticket package. Who they play doesn’t matter for them as much because those tickets are already sold.”
There are a plethora of other factors that go into a team’s non-conference schedule. How many days do you need in between games to rest and prepare? Do you go to an MTE for a guarantee or to trade for future homes games with the other participants? How often do you want to play on the road? Do you have an open date for your rivalry game?
Many of those factors fell to the wayside when the season was shortened. Three of the four games the Bobcat women’s team lost were set to take place inside Strahan Arena. Now Texas State begins the year with five-straight road games. Neither of the maroon and gold’s teams had a date that worked with I-35 rival UTSA. It’ll be the first time the Bobcats and Roadrunners’ men’s teams don’t play each other since the 2013-14 season and the first time for the women’s teams since 1980-81.
But the schedules are finally set and the season is underway. For now. COVID-19 protocols and concerns have already canceled or postponed dozens of games this year. Teams will try to make those games up, either at a later date, with another team or both. Hausladen said he’s currently constructing a matrix of all the schedules inside the “busable bubble” — teams from states as far west as New Mexico and as far east as Mississippi — and plans to share it with those schools to make it easier to find a replacement opponent.
“The keyword is ‘flexibility,’” Teymer said. “It’s gonna be similar like with football. You know, I think people see a lot now with football where they just almost picked up someone halfway during the year or things like that. So I think it’s gonna be one of those things where flexibility is still gonna have to be key. So right now our schedule is set, knock on wood, but it’s something that we’re always gonna keep monitoring and looking at, too.”
The Texas State women’s team plays at SMU on Thursday at 7 p.m. The men’s team hosts Incarnate Word inside Strahan Arena at 2 p.m. on Saturday. But both teams’ schedules are subject to change.
“We just don’t know what this five-month season’s going to look like,” Hausladen said. “It could be a situation where everyone plays 20 games, most of their schedule. It could be a situation where a lot of teams are struggling to get to 20 games. We just don’t know yet. So I think you have to check the boxes as they come.”
