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Back to normal
Men’s Basketball has tough Horizon League schedule
By Jimmy Lemke
Last year around this time, there was an aura of surprise.
Almost all conference home games during the semester, that was sweet. Tough road games at Green Bay, Butler, and Valpo were over break. Nice. Five home games after February 1st was a completely foreign idea to Panther fans.
The honeymoon is over. The Horizon League, located in Indianapolis, has long had the stigma of sticking it to strong teams in the conference and favoring hometown Butler in its schedule-making. Whether that’s true or not, fans of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee have felt that the conference has not been kind to the team. Then, last year hit and everyone was taken aback.
Never fear, Milwaukee fans, the Horizon League is back to its old hijinks.
This year’s schedule features 4 of 7 conference games in January before students move back in at home. For those of you who relish coming to the Green Bay game, always a packed student section, you’ll have to make the trip back during break. While it seems like that may be an accident, you don’t know the half of it.
The Horizon League, with ten participants, uses a system called “Travel Partners” where teams are split into pairs, usually the most geographically close to each other, and then those teams travel to meet other travel partners. In conference, Milwaukee’s partner is Green Bay, Loyola and UIC from Chicago, Butler and Valpo from Indiana, and so on. For instance, last year on the Indiana trip, UWM played at Valpo on a Thursday and then at Butler two days later on a Saturday. Green Bay played the flip, at Butler and then at Valpo.
When it is time for the travel partners to play each other, they usually don’t get scheduled another conference game in the same week. This is for two reasons: it makes the schedule work, and it builds the rivalries. Since in almost all cases the travel partners are geographical rivals (UIC and Loyola are in the same city, for cryin’ out loud), it would make sense for the travel partners to play while school is in session, to maximize the amount of students able to go to the game.
While this has been the case for a long time, it isn’t this year. While Milwaukee hosts Green Bay on Jan. 9th, you’ll most likely be running the pumps at Speedway trying to save up so you can buy a 5 dollar cup every weekend night this semester. Way to prioritize the rivalry, Horizon League.
As far as the non-conference schedule goes, it’s actually pretty good. The World Vision Classic four-team tournament at Iowa State is very winnable for the Panthers. Upper Iowa is too much of a pushover, and the Panthers won’t need a tune-up after the tournament in Iowa.
The Marquette game is moved up a week this year. The good news is that Milwaukee fans won’t have to deal with the disparaging and out-of-line remarks from Tom Crean following the game this November, with a far more classy coach in Buzz Williams at the helm.
Sandwiched in between the big in-state non-conference games is Ball State, a return game from a year ago. Ball State is a team in flux, still recovering from the sudden departure of Ron Thompson in the Summer of ’07.
UW-Madison brings the annual series with Milwaukee back to the Kohl Center to close out November. The game between Bo Ryan and Rob Jeter is always a fun one to watch, and the mentor hosts the student this time around.
After opening the conference schedule in Milwaukee, the Panthers go to Miami (the cold one in Ohio) on Dec. 11th as part of a home-and-home series with athletic director Bud Haidet’s alma mater.
The ESPN BracketBuster matchup from last year, Bradley, will return the favor by coming to Milwaukee in the final hours of the semester on Dec. 20th. NCAA D-I provisional member SIU-Edwardsville will be playing at UWM in the middle of January. The Panthers, having played their last two BracketBuster games away from home, will host their first since a loss to Missouri State in 2006.
Luckily for UWM, they play at archrival UIC during winter break. That’s a bright spot in a slightly less-than-preferred conference schedule. The good news is that the non-conference schedule features some solid high-major opposition and a solid set of mid-level talent in Bradley and Miami. Helping SIU-Edwardsville get into the swing of things this year will pay dividends down the road, and the exempt tournament at Iowa State is a plus. My only concern is playing Upper Iowa again. Division II teams should probably be left to exhibition. Many teams play D-II talent, but I don’t like playing a team that can’t help the RPI. When the team is on the border of an at-large berth or they want to be a higher seed, sometimes they find they wish they had played a D-I team in place of the D-II squad. If it’s a beatdown you’re looking for, there are 200 low-majors that will take 2-for-1 or 3-for-1 series.
Elsewhere, the schedule looks just fine to this writer. The tournament feeds well into tough games at MU and UW, and the conference schedule is complemented well by SIU-E, Bradley, and the BracketBuster game.
The most important date for basketball? MSOE, November 5th. One game at a time.
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