Big East’s Jackson answers Hurley’s gripes

Stu Jackson has one of the more impossible jobs in college sports: Trying to make every Big East coach happy with their respective schedules.

In fact, Jackson, the Big East’s executive associate commissioner of men’s basketball who, along with assistant commissioner of men’s basketball Mike Coyne is responsible for drafting the league schedule, has all but realized it’s an impossible task.

“At the end of the scheduling process, if all 11 schools complain about something, we’ve probably done a good job,” Jackson quipped.

Now enter into the mix a global pandemic that has rocked the college basketball world over the past two seasons, and Jackson’s job is even harder. Still, even after 11 cancellations/postponements over the past few weeks have changed the shape of the league’s season schedule moving forward, it could be worse.

It could be as bad as 202021.

“Last year, we had more teams going on pause, which made it a little bit more onerous,” Jackson recalled. “Plus, it started earlier in the season, which was also a factor. And, because last year the athletic directors did not have

‘scheduling parameters,’ it made it a free-for-all.”

Indeed, the lack of parameters led to “gamesmanship” among the league’s programs and coaches, according to Jackson.

“Some of the gamesmanship was because the health and safety and welfare of the student-athletes was at play,” Jackson noted. “But there was also gamesmanship with respect to selecting certain games over others, because we didn’t have any parameters.”

That’s changed this season, as the league’s athletic directors have left re-scheduling in the hands of the conference office. And there are now parameters at play. No school will have to play more than three games in a week. And if they do play three games in a week, they won’t have to do so the following week.

No team will play backto-back games, either. However, some will have to play on uneven rest. And several will have to play on one day’s rest.

In fact, there are three different instances when teams will have to face each other, home and away, with just one day in between, like one of those NBA back-toback quirks. UConn is involved with one such scenario. The Huskies will host Butler on Jan. 18 in Hartford, then fly out to Indianapolis to play the Bulldogs at Hinkle Fieldhouse on Jan. 20.

“It’s bizarre,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said on Friday. “We’ve asked for a lot of things from the conference office and haven’t got much of it.”

Now, like just about any college basketball coach, Hurley is never truly content. His own father, Bob Sr., told Hearst Connecticut Media back in 2018: “He likes to complain ... His way of telling you things are going well is ‘We need a lot of work.’ ”

Two years ago, Hurley griped that the American Athletic Conference tried to sabotage the Huskies’ final season in the conference by making them open up league play with consecutive road games at Cincinnati and South Florida.

This year, Hurley’s beef was that UConn was slated to have both of their “bye weeks” (a week between games) within the first few weeks of the season, then no such breaks the rest of the way. Now, the Huskies’ two rescheduled games make the remainder of their schedule even busier, Hurley theorizes.

“It really comes back to hurt us,” he said. “I voiced my displeasure about having bye weeks so early in conference play. But, like some other things we’ve brought up scheduling-wise with the conference, there was no adjustment made.”

According to Jackson, there are a variety of reasons UConn had its two bye weeks so early in its league schedule.

“That’s the way his schedule fell,” he said. “Every school in the conference would love to have their byes evenly-spaced. As a coach, I would want that. But, that’s not reality in the Big East. When you’re dealing with building availabilities for some of our schools, having to do with broadcast windows for all of our schools, and trying to balance out the competitive inequities around those factors, drafting a schedule can be a tricky task.”

The Big East finished its 2021-22 league schedule around mid-September. This was before the Omicron variant was even a thing, so there was no way for the Big East — or any league — to factor in possible COVID-related pauses and cancellations, as it did last season. Every school had 20 games to play over 22 play-dates.

“There will be times when schools have more back-to-back home games than they’d like, or more back-to-back road games than they would like,” Jackson said. “They have more games where they’re playing on equal rest or unequal rest. They have games where their tip times are late, or their tip times are early. So, with all these factors, it’s impossible to draft the perfect schedule for every school.”

With UConn’s Dec. 28 bout at Xavier postponed to Feb. 11, the Huskies will play three games in the span of five days that week. Over a 26-day span of February, UConn will play nine games.

“I guess the positive is there’s not going to be much time to stew over losses, and not much time to celebrate any victories,” said Hurley. “We’ll just deal with it. We’re thrilled to be able to play out a full season, after last year. Players love to play games and love less practice time, so victory for the players and bad for the coaches.”

While rescheduling games is in the league’s hands, cancelling games is essentially in the hands of the programs. If a program can’t field a team with seven healthy scholarship players, it provides the league with a detailed rundown of their roster, identifying players that are unable to compete for whatever reasons — COVID-19 protocols, injuries, red-shirts, disciplinary reasons.

Likewise, when a team is able to compete, it provides a similarly detailed breakdown — without citing players’ names.

Jackson said the league’s schools “have been great” in communicating their issues. He shares in Hurley’s optimism that there is a runway to complete the rest of the season with few cancellations — to a degree.

“Players that are vaccinated and boosted, or players that have antibodies in their system and aren’t required to be tested for 90 days — I think the combination of those things gives us a fighting chance to play as many games as we can,” Jackson said.

“I’m cautiously optimistic. But, the virus is gonna virus. That, we can’t control.”