another 6 day, progressively harder schedule with long road trip to Creighton to cap it off.
Why does this years scheduling feel more & more like another unfavorable one like last years, coincidence?
While the pandemic deserves 90% of the blame, I do think the BE could have done a better job utilizing the schools' locations to each other to reduce travel. Everyone but Creighton has a traditional "travel buddy" -- the BE could have taken a page out of the Ivy League's book and done games on Saturday/Mondays (or Thursday/Saturdays) with mini road trips. For example:
UConn and Providence are obvious travel buddies. Same with DePaul and Marquette. DePaul plays at UConn and Marquette plays at PC on Saturday and then they swap for Monday. Easy for all involved. Add a game on every-other Wednesday to make up for the mismatch (aka Creighton geographically) and you have your solid 5 games every 14 days with minimum travel.
Obviously extremely complicated because of the odd number of teams and the TV obligations, but something could have been done.
UConn & Providence - 1 hr 15 min
St. John's & Seton Hall - 40 min
Nova & Gtown - 2 hr 30 min
Xavier & Butler - 2 hours
Marquette & Depaul - 1 hr 30 min
Not to mention the 6 classic BE teams are all close and the midwest (not Creighton) 4 are relatively close (easy for a Sat-Mon-Wed trip). Would suck to do a 3 game road trip in 5 days but if the most you're traveling is 3 hours by bus on the in-between day it's not
that bad and it would probably only need to happen once.