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The remedy is....well, it's pretty tough. Why can Elon and UNCW get Ol' Roy into their building? Probably because someone in both programs has a special connection to Roy and he'll do them a favor and bring his Heels in to stomp them. Does Pat have any of those type of connections? No idea. Scheduling at our level is not easy at all because it takes two to make a matchup and I've gotta think that they reach out to a number of A-10/MAC/Big East etc. teams to bring in but the vast majority of those teams are, frankly, too scared to take a road game against a school like us. Why won't Maryland come play us at SECU even if it was a 2 or 3 for 1? Same goes for a Georgetown or a Virginia/VA Tech or a West Virginia. It's because those coaches look at it as a no-win proposition. They don't feel like they need to come into the Baltimore market with their team to mine recruiting and playing against someone like us does nothing for their power rating especially if they should happen to <gasp> lose to us. As a result, we have to scrounge around and get what we can. Personally, I think it's right that we play the Baltimore teams just like I think it's right that all the Philly teams play against each other (even more so if Drexel gets left out). We can't help it that those teams might be down or that people in Baltimore aren't basketball fans enough to pay attention to the locals. I also give Pat and Tim credit for getting us into these various tournaments these last couple of years. Fort Myers was perfect for us, Bahamas was the right class but we weren't ready for it, and Charleston is definitely a step up but it'll be a great barometer to show us what we need to do for the conference season. As for the Goucher game, I don't like it from the standpoint that it's a D3 game that's essentially an exhibition. But having it as the 2nd game of the season and a tune-up before Florida and the Charleston Tournament will get everyone a good amount of reps because depth is going to be necessary in 3 games in 3 days against 3 likely difficult opponents. I'm just curious to hear others' opinions on who they think we should be bringing in and if they understand how scheduling these games works.

Blazer definitely brings up some good points -- don't have to shoot for the stars, can still get the lower-end of the power 5 conferences -- Rutgers, Vandy, Wake, etc. Those schools could definitely stand to market themselves to the Baltimore recruiting market. But an athletic department that doesn't want to schedule teams that might/will likely blow us out is an athletic department with a loser mentality. We're not gonna try to schedule Carolina, a team that will guarantee a sellout and a nice financial kick in the ass, because there's gonna be more blue in the stands and we might lose by 25? That's a bad precedent to set. I would hope that no one anywhere would think like that...but nothing would surprise me about ours. One last issue about scheduling the biggest of the big teams -- they won't play on campus. The last time we played a 'home' game against Maryland, we had to play it at the Arena in '95 and we got hosed. We can call up Duke or Kansas or someone of that caliber and they'll be like, 'sure we'll play you but let's go downtown or to DC. Duke's done that to Temple for years -- we won't play in your 10,000-seat on campus arena but we'll gladly go down Broad Street to Wells Fargo. That's the arrogance of those schools and unfortunately, the little guys give in because the payday is that much bigger.

Personally, I don’t think the OOC slate is bad; Florida, Vermont, Kent State, Cornell, UMBC, GW, the tournament in Charleston & the one in DC. I have no problem with us playing Morgan State & while I would prefer not to play a D3, I seem to recall that last year just about every other team in the CAA (if not every other team) played a D3. Heck, hasn’t MD played Bowie & Catholic U recently? I do agree that, compared to other CAA teams, our home OOC schedule is lackluster. I don’t know what the remedy for that is