I would add that Big 12 teams should adjust their schedules as well... If you are asking mid-majors to adjust theirs.
OU should play Tulsa, Wichita State, Colorado State, Richmond, Northern Iowa, New Mexico instead of Maryland Eastern Shore, William & Mary, UTSA, UTRGV, etc. They won't do that because they know they will lose more games. Plain and simple.
We saw what happened this year when OU scheduled legitimate mid-majors. Crazy risk. Lost to Wichita State, beat UCF by 1, beat North Texas by 2. Props for scheduling them and beating them, but they won't want to play more teams like that in one season. If they did, they would have more losses and be exposed. Just like Texas Tech would.
I do not know how to do the separate quotes within in a post (amateur), so I will address a couple of your thoughts:
Exactly... Texas Tech losing to every good team they played shouldn't be rewarded with an NCAA Tournament bid.
Tech beat Louisville (3 seed or better) on a neutral floor. They also beat us, WV and @Texas. They've proven they can go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the country (lost @KU by 3 and @Baylor by 3; also lost close games at home to both schools).
Richmond had (19) Q-3/Q-4 games and went 18-1. They had a really good neutral floor win over Wisconsin as well. However, they only got to play Dayton once (lost to them in Richmond) and were blown out several times against decent to good competition (Auburn, VCU, St. Louis, Bama). Yes Tech's record isn't great, but they were more competitive against a much more difficult schedule.
UNI's schedule was pretty bad....(22) Q-3/Q-4 games and went 19-3. They had a really good @Colorado...and that's about it. The Mo Valley was down this year and they feasted on it for the most part. They should learn not to lose a Q-3 game by 21 points in your conference quarterfinals.
At some point, metrics have to come into play. That is the best and most reasonable way to equate differing schedules and reconciling those schedules with results. I don't really like the NET, so let's take Kenpom (or any other advanced analytics model you want). Tech (#21) is substantially better in virtually all of them from a results and efficiency standpoint than either Richmond (#46) or UNI (#48). That tells me that if the schedules were flipped, than Tech would potentially have a much better record and UNI/Richmond would have a much worse record. But like you said, we'll never know.
Maybe, maybe not. But Northern Iowa won 25 games and only lost 6. Texas Tech is barely .500. That should matter.
If this is going to be a criteria, then do we start to look at teams like Wright State (25-7) and Radford (21-11) and give them some consideration? Both had good records (moreso Wright State), won their league, but got ousted in their conference tournaments. I'm just not sure how much you can weigh "records" when, in a way through analytics, they are already being accounted for.
And like I said, I'm not against Richmond making it in at all, but not in place of Tech. They should make it in place of NC State or Stanford. I'm not real high on UNI (and wasn't ever) making it because they simply are not one of the best 30-32 teams after you include the auto-qualifiers.
Good discussion though.
