As power conferences consolidate control over college basketball, leagues like the Atlantic 10 are being legislated out of their ability to earn at-large bids. With the margin for error narrowing more each season, the A-10 cannot afford to stand idly by and be squeezed into irrelevancy. The league must explore new approaches to give its programs the best chance to return to multi-bid status. One of those approaches - if not the main one - is dynamic scheduling.

It’s February 4, 2026

Every Atlantic 10 team has completed 13 games, one against every league opponent (you can see every team's hypothetical schedule, results, and Quad differentials to the left). Two teams are firmly in the at-large picture after strong non-league showings and six solid weeks of conference play. A third is gaining ground, fully healthy and without any damaging losses.

This is the point where the season tilts. These teams will either play their way into March, or slip and push the league to one bid for the third time in four seasons. That margin is only getting tighter.

The A-10 conference schedule has long featured a handful of home-and-home matchups, which are based on geography, rivalries, or projected strength. Before the portal era, that approach was easier to justify. Rosters were stable. Projections largely held up. Now, with record offseason turnover annually, building February schedules in July is guesswork - and the cost shows up in March.

Look no further than this past season’s Atlantic 10 Strength of Schedule, which highlight exactly why a static model can work against the league’s best interests. Richmond, the lowest NET in the conference, finished with the toughest schedule, while George Mason - a team that was in legitimate at-large contention into February - ranked dead last. VCU, which would have somehow missed an at-large bid had they not won the A10 Tourney, sat in the bottom four.

A schedule structure where bid-worthy teams are hindered by low-opportunity schedules (and other teams are helped or hurt by unbalanced home-and-home opponents that affect seeding) reinforces the need for a merit-based, adaptive scheduling model that aligns opportunity with performance, rather than locking it into place eight months ahead of time.

The league now can’t control things like keeping their best players, or getting good non-league games against the P4, or how the NET is calculated, or how a selection committee might evaluate teams any given year depending on agendas. But it can control its own structure, and that decision would come soon, if they wanted it.

One option is to stay with the current status quo model: a static schedule set months in advance, with no regard for how the season unfolds. That’s how a bubble team ends up finishing the year with multiple Q4 games and lose-lose matchups that carry real risk to your team.

The other option is dynamic. After 13 games, once the standings reflect performance, the schedule adjusts. Teams are grouped accordingly, and the final stretch is built around where they are, not where they were expected to be.

How the Split Round Works

The model starts with a 13-game round robin. Each team plays every other A-10 opponent once - a straightforward, balanced rotation with clean tiebreakers. In this hypothetical concept, conference play opens on December 20, followed by a second game on December 27. Some flexibility can be built in to accommodate existing non-league commitments (for example, VCU is already scheduled to host New Mexico on December 21). The key is the overall concept and structure, not rigid uniformity. After the holidays, the league moves into its regular rhythm, completing the round robin over six weeks.

On February 4, the league splits. The top seven teams form one group; the bottom seven form another. These groups are locked for A-10 Tournament seeding - meaning the eighth-place team cannot pass the seventh by benefiting from a lighter late-season schedule.

From there, each team plays six additional games - one against every other team in its half - to close the 19-game conference slate. ("But you can't play 19 games! The league schedule is 18 games!") It doesn't have to be, nor should it be. Fourteen of 15 league members played non-D1 opponents last season, some multiple, and there's talk of college basketball expanding to 33 or 34 game seasons. With leagues like the A10 being left out of dates with the P4, and MTEs being hijacked by power leagues, chances for good wins are difficult to come by. Why not add an additional game if you know it'll be a high-value one for your top teams?

The benefit is twofold. Contenders face Q1/Q2 competition that can boost their NCAA Tournament cases. Teams in the bottom half of the standings will never be playing for at-large bids, as that window has closed. By February, the NET rankings of bottom-half A10 teams can only matter if it's due to them being a landmine (if they’re facing a team still in the NCAA conversation). But the games themselves still matter, as there’s still a race for league position and a first-round bye in the A-10 Tournament. Dynamic scheduling keeps that race fair.

The Results

The 2024–25 season, with its average balance of power and clean NET hierarchy, offered a useful baseline. Using last year’s real NET rankings, a full 2025–26 simulation was built: 13 round-robin games, six split-round games, and one strategic non-conference matchup (more on this later). In other words, "what would a dynamic schedule look like with last season's NET?"

Win/loss results were assigned with team strength and location in mind, but the specific outcomes weren’t the point. If you swapped VCU for Arkansas Pine Bluff or Dayton for Prairie View A&M, the structure would still tell the same story. This exercise wasn’t about who won, or your team getting put in the bottom half. It was about where those games lived - in Quad 1, 2, 3, or 4 - and how smart internal scheduling can move the needle. Because next season, a team in the bottom half of this concept could play their way into the top half.

So generally, what were those results? The full league saw a +27 swing in Quad games and résumé-building value league-wide, achieved only by reassigning games more strategically. The gains weren’t evenly distributed, and that’s the point.

The top 7 teams picked up:

+7 Q1
+17 Q2

And shed:

–3 Q3
–6 Q4

There were no Q3 or Q4 games gained by the top half. It was exclusively Q1 and Q2 value added. And with a better performance in the non-league slate or more meticulous home/away placement, these numbers could improve even more.

That’s where the margin lives in March. These are the games that shape at-large profiles and the kinds of matchups that aren't guaranteed in a static model, where top teams can find themselves closing the season against Q4 opponents with nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Instead, those low-end games remained in the bottom half of the league - with teams that have no path to an at-large bid, and whose NET rankings only matter if they’re playing spoiler. That’s where Q3 and Q4 games should belong, not on the schedule of a bubble team trying to stay afloat in February.

The bottom 7 teams saw:

–5 Q1
–10 Q2
+19 Q3
+10 Q4

What these teams lost in résumé value, they gained in structure. Every team still played for something: a spot in the standings, a first-round bye, and a fair shot in the A-10 Tournament. And instead of one team drawing VCU and George Mason twice while another gets Fordham and La Salle, every bottom-half team plays every other team once. Movement up or down in the standings comes from head-to-head results within the tier - not from schedule luck.

The March Makers Challenge

The dynamic model also opens space for one more hypothetical and best-case scenario layer: a mid-February non-conference game between the A-10, AAC, and MVC. Similar to the old Bracket Busters, I'm calling it the March Makers Challenge. It matches all 38 teams across the three leagues based on current NET rankings: top vs. top, middle vs. middle, bottom vs. bottom.

The goal is straightforward - give every team a 20th game that fits where they are, gains more unique national exposure, and adds an opportunity to add a Q1 or Q2 game at a time when schedules may have otherwise run dry.

It doesn’t affect league standings and isn’t part of the split round - it’s simply a smart use of the calendar, positioned to help teams maximize résumé value in a critical stretch of the season. There’s also long-term potential, as March Makers can serve as a structural replacement for the November buy games that flood schedules with non-Division I or 300+ NET opponents. Instead of frontloading meaningless games, leagues can build something new and marketable at the exact time of year when national attention is already shifting toward March.

The Status Quo Isn't Working

In a system where a single Q4 loss can end any shot at an at-large bid, and a missed Q1 opportunity can keep a team off the bubble, setting a schedule months before rosters are finalized no longer makes sense. Static models assume teams will follow a predictable arc, but that’s not how the season works, especially now. Some teams hit their stride in January. Others fade. Some play their way into relevance. Others never get there.

That variability is baked into the modern game, and the schedule should account for it. Power conferences already operate with structural advantages, closed non-league scheduling loops where they only play teams from other power leagues or sub-250 NET buy games to inflate metrics. For leagues like the A-10, AAC, and MVC, the margins are smaller, and the schedule has to do more.

If these leagues can’t control how they’re evaluated, they have to control what they can. That starts with internal scheduling. Not because it guarantees bids, but because it creates the conditions for them to happen. Recent results have shown how the status quo is impacting the league’s bid trends, and it's not pretty.