Pretty interesting (and LONG) article following Coppin State on the start of their season, as shaped and formed by their need and desire to play road games to make money.
www.si.com/college/2021/12/15/coppin-state-basketball-road-schedule-daily-cover Here's a few snippets...
"Coppin State’s 2021–22 schedule looks like it could be one big typo. The Eagles opened the season with four games in five days, a cadence the NBA eliminated from its schedules after the 2016–17 season to give players reasonable rest. That stretch started with a pair of games in Chicago on a Tuesday and Wednesday, then concluded with another in New Jersey against Rider on a Friday night, followed by a matchup with UConn in Hartford the next day at noon. All in all, Coppin State played 10 games in 19 days—and 13 games in a month—to start the season.
This grueling schedule wasn’t put together because coach Juan Dixon (yes, that Juan Dixon, Maryland’s all-time leading scorer) wanted to toughen up his team. Like most things in college sports these days, the move started with money. The gap between NCAA haves and have-nots has never been wider, and Coppin State is squarely in the have-nots category. CSU is an HBCU with a 2020 budget of just $4.2 million—for its entire athletic department.
One of the main ways CSU funds that $4.2 million budget is playing so-called “guarantee” games (also known as “buy games”)—one-offs in which the home team writes a check to the road team, rather than later traveling the other direction as part of a home-and-home series. In men’s college basketball, the going rate for these games used to be somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000, depending on the opponent, but industry sources say that rate has dropped since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a school like CSU, the revenue from these guarantee games helps to fund not just men’s basketball, but also the athletic department as a whole. The Eagles don’t sponsor football, which makes men’s basketball the breadwinner. So the mandate from above to Agumagu, who was in charge of putting together the schedule, is simple: Get as much as you can.
“A bad year for me is $700,000,” says Agumagu. “I constantly strive to stay in that $750,000 range.”
Looking for the best possible guarantee games for CSU is a 365-day-a-year job. The prerequisites? The opponent needs to pay well, the destination needs to be somewhere east of the Mississippi River (an athletic department policy) and, ideally, the game needs to be winnable.
As taxing and challenging as CSU’s schedule is, it’s also a necessary evil of sorts. The athletic department’s main income driver is a $415 student athletics fee that all undergraduates pay each semester. But with undergrad enrollment down by more than 26% since the fall of 2017, there’s even more pressure on the men’s basketball program to bring in revenue. So Agumagu works all year trying to put together a palatable schedule that brings in enough revenue to support the athletic department. One thing that has helped: Since ’19, the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference has lost four teams in realignment shuffling; now the league plays 14 conference games, rather than 16, which opens up room for two more guarantee games on the calendar.
Coppin State’s schedule-building process begins with the Power 6 teams. Those schools generally pay the most, so those games get priority. They also provide the best chance for the Eagles to play on national TV, which is cool for players (and good for program exposure and recruiting). And those scheduling conversations can happen all year round, even after games. After an 89–54 loss to UConn to wrap up the season-opening four-games-in-five-days stretch, Agumagu stopped Huskies scheduling coordinator Eric Youngcofski in the postgame handshake line to let him know he’d be calling soon to see about playing again next year.
CSU’s staff is as small as you’ll find in Division I: three assistants and a director of ops—no additional support staff that can work on advanced scouting or recruiting or scheduling or any of the other back-end tasks that make a team run while the coaches focus on winning. At one point during the Eagles’ time in Chicago, all three assistants (Agumagu and brothers John Auslander and Kent Auslander) crowded with Dixon around a single table in a hotel meeting room, each coach watching film of a different upcoming opponent. The workspace was covered with empty Uncrustables wrappers, a few packs of fruit snacks and ample bottled water. At the lowest levels of Division I sports, multitasking is part of the job, and few college basketball staffs embody that standard the way Coppin State’s does during this road trip.
And while the team’s unsightly 1–14 record may not be indicative of how it will fare against weaker competition in the MEAC, the losses add up against a team’s psyche. And it’s not just the blowouts, like the opener at Loyola Chicago. At one point, CSU went three consecutive games where it was tied or leading in the final 30 seconds but lost in the final moments. You could hear those losses in the voices of the players, even as they expressed gratitude for the opportunity to play on this stage and optimism about what could come in conference play. The goal of an NCAA tournament bid remains fully in front of the Eagles if they can win the MEAC tournament in March."