Love the concept, but was hoping Missouri Valley would have been the opposing conference. Exciting overall. Guessing teams are paired based on previous season records?
I suggested this over email to, Doug Elgin, the commissioner of the MVC, and Jerry Ippoliti, the commissioner of the MAC, back in the late 90's. This was back when both conferences expected a fairly realistic chance at at-large bids but it wasn't an every year thing. Ippoliti never responded to me. Elgin was very, very interested in the idea. You guys might know that I can be quite the nerd when I want to be. I has used my real name in the email and had posted analysis of the RPI and other basketball related stuff online. Elgin either somehow knew who I was or had done a web search on me. Then in an email exchange he started asking how the RPI is flawed, then if each conference going .500 in the challenge would raise or lower the collective RPI of the two conferences, and then he started asking me if it is so flawed if you could take advantage of the flaws.
You know what happened. The MAC's computer averages remained pretty high and on close to on par with the very best conferences outside the P6 until pretty recently. But hyper-parity was usually the culprit preventing any single team from being able to claim an at-large bid. The MVC sort of went on an at-large binge in the early 2000s while sometimes getting 3 teams. Then around maybe 2005 it came out that the MVC had internally been collectively planning non-conference scheduling in a way that would make it the very easiest for the teams to get wins that would raise the collective RPI of the MVC. I could not make this story up if I tried.