Sun Belt basketball undergoes major changes

NEW ORLEANS – After exploring a men’s basketball strategic plan since the fall of 2017, the Sun Belt Conference’s Presidents and Chancellors announced on Monday a series of sweeping changes to both non-conference and conference scheduling, the postseason conference tournament format, and the location of the conference tournament.

In addition, announcements regarding the women’s basketball tournament format and location were made as well.

The announcement comes at the conclusion of the Sun Belt Presidents and Chancellors meeting Monday that was held in Atlanta.  League members, including athletics directors and men’s basketball coaches, had previously held official meetings on the strategic plan in March and also as recently as May at the league’s spring meetings.

“The Sun Belt is committed to being an elite Division I NCAA conference and to accomplish our mission we are moving beyond the status quo to become more competitive in basketball,” said Sun Belt Conference and Georgia State University President Dr. Mark Becker. “The conference is positioned for and has an established history of success, and our membership recognizes that new ideas are often needed to rise to new levels of success.  The initiatives passed today demonstrate the commitment we have to pushing ourselves to the pinnacle of intercollegiate athletics.”

The major changes are:

1. As a first step for improving non-conference scheduling, Sun Belt men’s basketball teams will reserve two dates in the non-conference portion of their schedule to play against peer conference opponents.  Each team will have one home opponent and one away opponent from this scheduling alliance. 

2. In the next major portion of the strategic plan, the conference has adopted a scheduling format for the 2019-20 men’s basketball season – dubbed the “20-game smart schedule” – that will see the conference split into two divisions.

Each team will play a 16-game schedule with five home and five away games played against divisional opponents and three home and three away games against non-divisional opponents.  Based on the resulting standings of those 16 games, teams will then be placed in four pods. Each team will play the other two pod members once home and once away for the final four games of the 20-game schedule.  The regular season conference champion will be awarded based on the results of the full 20-game conference schedule.

3. At the completion of the regular season, teams will be seeded for the conference tournament based on the results within their pod range.  As an example, a team in Pod A (#1, #2, #3) cannot be seeded any lower than No. 3 seed.  It is possible, however, that the regular season champion – the team that earned the No. 1 position in Pod A – would not be the No. 1 seed in the tournament should that team not have the best pod record amongst the three teams in that pod.

4. Starting in the 2020 season, the men’s and women’s semifinals and finals will be held in the Smoothie King Center to provide more of a ‘Final Four’ experience.

The rounds played prior to the semifinals will be held at campus sites. For instance, the No. 10 seed will play at the No. 7 seed and No. 9 at No. 8 on Saturday, March 7, 2020.

5. As for the 2019 Sun Belt Tournament, all 10 teams will be in the bracket, but only the final eight will play at Lakefront Arena in New Orleans.

The top two seeds will receive byes to the semifinal round and the third and fourth seeds byes into the quarterfinal round.