Here’s why Isaac Brown has a ‘gut feeling’ Wichita State’s schedule will change
In his weekly news conference with local media Tuesday afternoon, Wichita State men’s basketball coach Isaac Brown delivered some good and bad news.
Despite their status as a first-place team in the American Athletic Conference, the Shockers (13-4) are generally considered just outside of the NCAA Tournament cut line, in part because of their lack of games (and wins) against quality opponents (WSU is 2-4 against top-100 teams in the NET).
That’s why WSU has been desperately trying to schedule a marquee nonconference game for later this week after the Shockers (NET No. 68) lost out on two chances for a quality win when SMU (NET No. 59) had to postpone — yet again — both games scheduled for this week because of COVID-19 issues within its program.
That brings us to the good and bad news. Bad news first.
“We called a couple Big East schools, a school in the SEC, a team in the Mountain West, and we weren’t able to do that,” Brown said. “We’ll continue to look for a game for Saturday, but I don’t think it will happen.”
While Brown sounded pessimistic WSU would be able to find a nonconference game this week, he sounded optimistic that the AAC would be able to alter WSU’s conference schedule and give the Shockers a crack at potentially either SMU or Memphis (NET No. 61). Brown hinted that WSU might learn of schedule changes as early as Tuesday from the conference’s office.
WSU is currently scheduled to play Wednesday, March 3 at Tulane and Saturday, March 6 at Temple to close out its regular-season slate.
“Right now we have two games left, but my gut feeling is we would play someone else during that time next week,” Brown said. “I’m not really sure who, but I definitely think that’s going to happen. I think they want to try to match certain teams up, but I think they’re looking at everyone’s schedules to see if they can get it done.”
WSU has had a scheduled conference game postponed nine times this season — with all nine being the result of COVID-19 issues within the other team’s program. Among the postponements, WSU has four home games (East Carolina, South Florida, Memphis, SMU) and three away games (East Carolina, Cincinnati, SMU) yet to be rescheduled.
In the conference’s quest to send a second team to March Madness, it would make sense to pit the three teams ranked in the top-75 of the NET but hovering on the wrong side of the bubble — WSU, SMU and Memphis — against one another for the quality games each team desperately needs. But finding a date that works for both teams is a near-impossible task, unless the conference gets creative and is willing to move — or cancel — existing games on those teams’ schedules.
Adding a potential game would not only affect WSU’s possible at-large standing for the NCAA Tournament, but the Shockers (9-2) also hold a slim lead over Houston (12-3) and Memphis (8-3) for the outright AAC championship with less than two weeks remaining in the season.
“I talked to the guys about that and told them, ‘Don’t get down when you can’t play teams,’” Brown said. “Just come to practice and control what you can control and continue to get better because you have an opportunity to win a championship. Just play championship basketball every day in practice and continue to get better and control what we can control.
“We have to stay sharp because we have a lot on the line.”
While WSU might have an anticipated showdown with a conference opponent next week, Brown has to worry about the Shockers for this week. When your team is perfectly healthy, going nearly two weeks in between games this late in the season is far from ideal.
Brown is adamant that the Shockers find some kind of opponent to play this week, although it’s clear he prefers a game that could potentially help boost WSU’s postseason résumé.
“I call those guys and let them know we need a game and then they’ll say they need a game, then it comes down to who wants to travel,” Brown said. “Some of the teams want to play, but they feel like they may need to play a team with a higher NET. Some teams want to play, but they might not be able to get the game on a date that we want.
“We called four or five teams to try to get a home game and none of those teams want to play. Two of those teams I called and said we would travel, but they didn’t want to play because it didn’t work out on the date. Even though we were willing to travel, the date didn’t work out for them. I felt like if we’re coming to your home building, we should at least be able to get the date. So we couldn’t come to a conclusion.
“Hopefully we can find a team that has a good NET that would help us, but I really think it’s going to be hard for teams to be willing to go out of conference to play basketball games at this time of the year.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2021 at 2:44 PM.
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