I have to admit that I am not comfortable with where my favorite team is right now. We are 12-5 and generally playing pretty good basketball — having won 9 out of 11. Another loss to Xavier has not helped matters, but 20 wins in the regular season is doable and you cannot complain about that. It is so rare in fact, that we have only accomplished it once in the last 30 years. Believe it or not, the NCAA team of two years ago was the first to do it since 1969. During that time, we have made it to the NCAA Tournament six times.

Times have changed though. Four of those visits were made during the time that we were an independent. The thought of being in a conference was discussed many times during those years, but never seemed to make sense. It is now virtually impossible to get to the Big Dance without the name of a conference attached to your team. There are several advantages to being in a conference that range from having players named to all-conference teams to getting the shared revenue of NCAA Tournament visits. Yet, the real reason for UD to play the conference game is the simple fact that our chance of getting invited to any NCAA Tournament would be virtually nil without that conference affiliation.

This is not only the case for basketball, but every other sport in which UD is represented. Be it soccer, basketball, volleyball, or baseball, we need the power of a conference behind us. Part of the problem that we face, however, is that in the non-basketball situations, the only way we can get in is through winning the conference tournament at the end of the season. This places far too much pressure on sweeping through a weekend set of games. The UD Women soccer team ended the season rated the 16th best team in the country. If they would have lost during the conference tournament, they might not have been given the opportunity to show the world just how good they were. The need to win the conference tournament is there only because of mediocrity in the other programs.

The same situation now exists for our men’s basketball team. After the loss at Xavier we now sit at number 50 in the RPI standings. My concern is that winning eight of the next ten games might not get us high enough in the rankings so that we do not have to do something special in the conference tournament. Our current strength of schedule will stay virtually the same should teams stay at their current strengths. With that in mind and the fact that the all of our remaining games will be against teams that are beating themselves up against each other and thus not improving the conference RPI, the outlook cannot be good. Even with the result from this weekend in mind, I would be hard pressed to say that we are not in the top three in the conference. The A-10 has been rated the eighth or ninth best conference in the country over the last several years. Please explain to me why the third best team in such a conference should even have to worry about getting into the tournament?

Every year we sit in front of the TV on Selection Sunday, just hoping that we get invited. In the last ten years that has only happened one time. During that period we have found ourselves in three different leagues. The league affiliation has not done us a great deal of good. The one year that we got in, we made it by the slimmest of margins. We are in a league that is perceived to be strong in some quarters, but no more than mid-major in others. The top of the league can hold their own with most conferences. The ACC tends to be in its own world, but I think our top three or four could hang with the rest if played on neutral courts.

That brings us to the real problem and that is the teams on the bottom. The ACC, Big 10, SEC and the other top 6 conferences all have a lower echelon — something that can’t be avoided. However, their worst teams would probably still handle our teams in the middle of the pack. Every year we seem to have four good teams, four so-so teams that can hurt you on their court, and then four teams that couldn’t beat a good team if they sold their souls to the devil. The A-10’s four worst teams this year are Rhode Island, Duquesne, Fordham, and LaSalle. Their average RPI ranking is 161. The ACC’s bottom four average 99. The Big 10 averages 135 while the SEC is at 75. The Big East comes in at 153 thanks in large part to A-10 refugee Virginia Tech at 223. If we want to play with the big boys, we need to have a league filled with teams that are as serious about winning as we are. This is true in all sports, but primarily in basketball.

I realize that we are not too many years away from being a bottom of the league team ourselves, but at least we have done what is needed to get back to a level of competitiveness that we can at least think about the NCAA Tournament at the beginning of the season. How many years has it been since Duquesne had a winning season? Fordham has not taken advantage of being in a better conference to truly upgrade their program. Rhode Island has become a joke since Harrick took his questionable tactics with him to Georgia. LaSalle has had flashes of competitiveness but for the most part has been a weaker team. You can talk about the other sports all you want, but this is a basketball conference and if you want to stay you should have to put a team on the floor that has a chance to win.

Temple is in the process of being thrown out of the Big East in football because they were not competitive. It is time that Linda Bruno steps up and puts some real pressure on the non-players to get their act together. They wouldn’t even have to be tossed from the league. We typically send 2, 3 or 4 teams to the NCAA Tournament and split the money 12 ways. I say if a team is in the bottom four, three out of four years, they don’t get any of the funding. If they average less that 5,000 for each of their home games for three of four years, they don’t get any of the funding. They need to produce and right now there are no penalties if they don’t.

The other option for UD is, of course, looking for a new conference. We already could be called nomads with our wandering between conferences. It would have to be the right opportunity to make us move. The conference would have to be made up of basketball only (non-Division I football) schools. They would have to stress a number of other sports such as soccer and volleyball, but would be known primarily for their basketball. The seemingly constant talk of an all-Catholic conference would make some sense in that basketball is their primary sport and they tend to have the same academic views.

The possibility of pulling in Marquette, DePaul, and St. Louis from Conference USA increases and decreases with the latest rumor. Football seems to be rearing its ugly head in C-USA but that doesn’t mean that the conference will dissolve. The Big East has had some internal struggles but it is doubtful that Georgetown, Providence, and Villanova are ready to start making the trip to the Midwest to play the other Catholic schools. Is it really any better adding Detroit-Mercy and Loyola (Chi) to the mix just to get enough teams?

If we can win against the name teams when we have a chance, we don’t need a top six conference to rest easy on the Selection Sunday. But until we get to that point, we need the help of a strong conference to improve how we are viewed by the selection committee. Twenty wins in the regular season should be enough and we shouldn’t have to worry about how some directional school does in their conference tournament. We need the rest of the conference to get serious about basketball. They need to get people in the stands and players on the court. If they don’t, they need to be reminded that the individual parts of the conference can only be as successful as the conference is as a whole.