Detroit Releases Non-Conference Schedule

Now you're being too hard. As the HL gets better as a league, as will be exhibited this season, our teams will have to tone down their ooc schedules. Even so, South Alabama, with former Butler assistant Matthew Graves, will be a good test for Detroit. Akron has been the standard bearer for the MAC as of late. UConn, South Florida, NCState...enough said! Every HL team is not gonna throw out an Oakland-type non-con!

Joker, are you serious? Okay, so take away the 4 non-D1 teams. You guys (I'm assuming you're a Titans fan) STILL have 10 games that, in all reality, you can actually win! So what if those teams, particularly NC State, are not going to be juggernaut's...they still have name recognition. To a hoops player at this level, beating North Carolina State at anytime is an accomplishment. They're not gonna say, years from now, "yeah we beat NC State, but they weren't as good that year!" Wins are wins! Would you rather your team come into conference play with a potential 10-0 record or wallow in the fact that they didn't schedule Michigan teams?

I don't know why everyone is so ga-ga over Oakland's schedule. Last year Detroit played St. John's, Pittsburgh, Miami (Fla.), Temple, Wichita State, Arizona State, and Syracuse, all on the road. The had some close calls - leading Miami and Pitt by double digits, leading St. John's most of the game, ultimately falling to Syracuse by just 4, leading Temple into the final minutes - but ended up 0-7. This helped Detroit's RPI, but actually hurt the RPIs for other teams in the conference, because the biggest single factor in RPI is the W-L record of your opponents. Oakland's brutal schedule (6 such games, Indiana, UNC, California, Gonzaga, UCLA, and Michigan State) is likely to harm the Horizon's RPI (though it will boost the strength of schedule) unless they pull a couple major road upsets.

Detroit's schedule is fine for mid-major. Besides NC State and UConn, many people are predicting Stony Brook and Toledo (whom the Titans play twice) to be NCAA teams. Akron is coming off a 26 win season and is probably Toledo's main rival in the MAC. Rhode Island is an Atlantic 10 team. There are only 2 NAIA games, not 3 (one is an exhibition) and the Canadian team is also an exhibition. Everbody plays such exhibitions. Your effort to puff up your case by citing those exhibitions suggest you've an axe to grind. Oakland's home schedule, for example, also includes 2 D-III/NAIA games

This is the weakest non-conference schedule the Titans have played in several years but it is fine, and will be better than the schedules played by several other Horizon teams.

The word, by the way, is that the Michigan MAC teams don't want to play UD - there is bad blood between Western coach Steve Hawkins and Ray McCallum, and the other two are probably just respecting their confernce partner's wishes. There is not going to be a "great lakes preseason tournament" of the type you suggest, at least not headed by UD and Oakland, or not involving Big 10 schools, because the Big 10 schools won't go for it, and those schools aren't going to schedule H&H with any Horizon team.

Hah! I'm one of the UD fans who doesn't hate or dis Oakland or Kampe. Catches me a lot of flack on the Detroit board. And I haven't dissed them here. I'm not the one who started the Oakland/UD comparison - if you look up the thread, that was Joker. I was responding to him. A lot of Horizon fans, however, are confused about how RPI works. You see it all over the league. People presume that Oakland's tough schedule will help the overall Horizon RPI. It will not. It will improve the league's SOS but not its RPI. That's just the reality.

Yeah, Oakland has a lot of tough games this year. UD did last year. It's not unheard of, and while it will help Oakland's RPI, it actually is not good for the rest of the league -- unless, of course, they win a bunch (!!). And that's always a problem for mid-majors. Scheduling too many tough teams in road games you're likely to lose doesn't help. Yet you've got to try, or you never get the win. I think the answer is somewhere between Oakland's "murderer's row" and Wright State's "bum of the week" club.

On the rest of the your post about marketing, you're preaching to the choir. I'm always puzzled myself as to why UD fans so resent Kampe - he's just a 2013, poor man's version of Dick Vitale (and that's intended as a compliment, not an insult). I think he's kind of amusing and he can be very self-deprecating about his own schtick.

Yes, I did actually bring up Oakland, but only because their OOC schedule was known among the other HL member teams as a killer schedule. Commissioner, it wasn't that we were going ga ga over it, it was mentioned just as a barometer.

You could say the same about probably every school in the SWAC and MEAC.