That's a great question for Mooney. I wish we had someone who would ask him and not just on a cursory level. Moon is the highest paid UR employee that's for him to figure out not me. But I'll indulge...
1. be willing to take many more road buy games. we aren't- that's a philosophy thing again. If u r only targeting 1 or 2 road buy or neutral u can get screwed easier when those 1 or 2 don't work out. If u r shooting for 4 or 5 of those games, maybe u don't end up here.
2. better MTE connections. Can't rely on Gazelle Group. They don't even have the best ones, yet those are the best ones we can ever get. Gazelle is run by Mooney's agent.
3. take less guaranteed $ on road than other teams. $ talks. And a school like Richmond can afford it more than most.
4. be willing to take less home games. simiilar to #1. Philosophy thing. I believe u even said 6 home OOC was the absolute floor. if u have to go to 5 go to 5. if we upset a red sweater (god bless em!) who misses out on Coppin St or John Tyler CC, they will be ok.
5. this one isn't a suggestion. but maybe it's just propaganda. Clearly there is some fake news going on with the Zoom collective calls. UR80s was told we were playing Auburn. It wasn't true. If we are, I will retract. I think u r relatively young (2017). I love UR but they are 100% not above misdirection & propaganda. Maybe they are saying they were great games and it was the other team's fault so it reflects less poorly on them. Maybe it wasn't very close at all. These maybes are all for spiderman!
I think you certainly bring up several good points on things we can do to position ourselves in the best way to get the best games possible. For instance, I agree and would love to have more MTE connections because the more connections we have the more opportunities we can be involved with. Certainly we should be reflective and look at what went wrong this year from a scheduling perspective and what are the things we can try to adapt and change (maybe it is take less guaranteed money or take more road games).
Still, everything you mention are the things we can do within our control. The way I see it, when we schedule games against other teams, 50% is within our control and the other 50% is not. This is not disagreeing with you on your points that you enumerated, but highlighting the 50% of the proverbial pie is out of our hands. At the end of the day we can try and do everything right and there may still be reasons things fall through. It is not for lack of trying to negotiate or compromise on our end. There are 350+ other teams all trying to negotiate/compromise with each other too.
Unless someone from the athletic department will openly share this, which I doubt they will (and don't necessarily think they have to) or if anyone has inside information here, then we'll never know. For instance if it turns out, hypothetically, that Auburn wanted to give us $80K buy-out and we wanted $100K then yes, I would say we shouldn't have been so strict with our negotiations and we would be more at fault.
What I do know and believe is that we have had solid schedules the past 15 years that have ranged from good to very good (maybe not "all out" by your definition). This is the first year I won't be satisfied with the schedule. If we have a miss of 1 out of 15 years, that's going to happen, and we should give our staff more of the benefit of the doubt is all I'm saying because they have shown an established history of pretty solid scheduling. If this however becomes a new pattern, then of course I will reassess my position.
