Will Wade went on Jon Rothstein’s podcast this week to talk about a variety of subjects, though what interested me the most was the discussion about the non-conference schedule. The full interview:
(You can safely skip the first 15 minutes or so.)
When asked about his approach to the schedule, this is what Wade said:
If the ACC is only gonna give us so many Quad 1 and Quad 2 opportunities, we’re fools if we don’t go out and schedule them ourselves. We’ve got a really good UAB team coming in, a really good Liberty team coming in. Those will both be Quad 2 games at home. You’ve got to go out and meet the numbers. We can sit here and complain all we want, ‘Oh the acc’s down, the ACC’s that,’ well I think the ACC is going to be better this year, the teams are going to be better, but we gotta go do our job.
If the ACC is only gonna give us six-seven Quad 1 games and we gotta get to 13, we gotta go schedule the other six. We can’t sit there and complain that’s what they’re giving us; let’s go schedule them. Once we got the matchups from the ACC, we felt like we needed to add another Quad 1 game, which is why we’re going to do this neutral-neutral series.
He’s teasing the Ole Miss series here, since this must have been recorded before that news broke. Anyway, the neutral site scheduling was confusing to me initially but obviously the man knows what he’s doing since playing in Greensboro gives you the credit for playing a neutral site game while still giving your team the home court advantage. An opponent needs to be top 50 to count as Quad 1 at a neutral site, vs. top 30 to qualify if the game is played in Raleigh. Little things like that can make a difference.
Once again it’s just refreshing to hear a coach talk about scheduling in a calculated way. This stuff doesn’t have to be difficult, especially once you’ve put together a good team.