Ken Davis

College basketball coaches face some of their toughest decisions during the offseason as they put together the final drafts of schedules they hope will help their team reach the NCAA Tournament. The emphasis in that sentence definitely is on the word hope.

Creighton coach Dana Altman thought he had it right when he took his Blue Jays to Dayton for their season opener. Some might disagree after Dayton won 90-80.

“Well, we couldn’t find another date, to be real honest,” Altman told The Sporting News. “It wasn’t my first choice. But we opened last year at home against New Mexico and the year before that against DePaul. We figured we’ve had two at home, we’re going to have a veteran group. We knew Dayton was going to be really good, but let’s go swing away.”

Only time will tell whether the loss hurts Creighton, but Altman’s thought process was precisely the attitude the NCAA encourages. Dan Guerrero, the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee Chair, was asked recently how a coach might get the attention of the committee.

“Obviously a balanced schedule is important in a lot of respects,” Guerrero said. “That means that you're playing good teams and you’re playing teams on the road. That’s obviously something that the committee has looked at over the course of time.”

Now seems as good a time as any to remind college basketball fans of a change in the way the selection committee will consider at-large teams when it convenes to pick the field for the 2010 tournament. In June, the NCAA announced the committee has decided to no longer consider the result of a team’s last 12 games as one of the tools available in the selection criteria.

In the past couple of seasons, that had become a subject of great criticism. Once considered a way to gauge how strongly a team finished the season, it wasn’t intended to shift the importance to one segment of a team’s schedule. But that became the perception. And with the advent of unbalanced schedules in the power conferences, it wasn’t fair. Some high-profile programs even had the benefit of non-conference games scheduled by television networks within those last 12 games. Mid-major programs certainly were left out of the picture.

So will the committee now shift its focus to another segment of the schedule? The answer to that: no.

“To quote from Mike Slive, last year's chair, he really emphasized the whole issue of the body of work,” Guerrero said. “That's really important to us. Every game counts every night. We have to count what happens now as much as what happens later in the year.

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“That being said, you know, 10 different individuals on the committee can evaluate each situation a little bit differently. Georgetown was a good example, coming out of the gate very strong, [but at the] end of last year they didn't finish strong. Eventually that had an impact. There were teams last year that had exceptional wins early on and were able to sustain that during the course of the year.”

All things considered, one of the things we love about college basketball is that early season games match Syracuse against Cal or North Carolina against Ohio State. College football could certainly learn a thing or two from this scheduling example.

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We think it’s cool that Hofstra played at Kansas and at UConn in a period of five days. Let Rider feel real good about that win over Mississippi State. Let Cal State Fullerton celebrate that victory over UCLA. And definitely keep an eye on Dayton after the Flyers defeated Georgia Tech to go 2-0.