Over the last week, two of the highest-profile head coaches in the Horizon League have offered blistering criticisms of the conference’s schedule.
Green Bay men’s coach Doug Gottlieb was one. After his Phoenix beat Milwaukee on Monday in front of 1,864 fans, Gottlieb took a vanilla question about the rivalry in an unexpected direction.
“It stays a rivalry when the league figures out that that’s a bad day to schedule a rivalry game,” he began. “I love [outgoing league commissioner Julie Roe Lach], wish her the best with the Indiana Pacers, but whoever becomes commissioner of this league, figure out that’s not the way you do it.”
“Fix the schedule. The schedule’s ridiculous. You shouldn’t play this game on a Monday night. If you do, it should be on ESPN on a Monday night.”
A day earlier, and a couple hours south on I-43, Cleveland State women’s coach Chris Kielsmeier delivered his first of a pair of rants concerning the Vikings’ itinerary after a loss to the Panthers. At that point, CSU had just finished its third game of an eventual four in a ten-day period, and was about to face a Wright State squad that was in the middle of four full off days ahead of that contest.
“This stretch and what the league asked us to do was brutal,” he said. “I think we need to look at scheduling in a very complex way in this league. Wright State plays their last game on Friday and is sitting at home waiting for us, and we’ve got to bus back tonight, and get in at two or three in the morning, whatever we’re going to do, and then play on Wednesday.”
“Like what kind of competitive advantages are these things? You ask a team to play four games in ten days when other teams aren’t doing that, with the kind of travel that we had in place…”
Those seemingly disparate issues have a common denominator.
Until 2023-24, the conference employed a travel partner system, where each HL school was paired off with a geographically-convenient rival, and those two teams would spend each weekend (on Thursday and Saturday or Friday and Sunday) either hosting or visiting a different set of travel partners. For example, partners Youngstown State and Robert Morris would head to Green Bay and Milwaukee over the same weekend. Then, when it came time for the Penguins and Colonials to play at home, GB and UWM would head southeast simultaneously.
There are several benefits to travel partners, including the idea that each HL school is similarly facing two games each week in a predictable rhythm. They also reduce travel costs most of the time, since, particularly for an isolated team like Green Bay, one trip to the region including both YSU and RMU is a lot cheaper than two.
However, when UIC departed the Horizon League after the 2021-22 season, the conference was left with an odd number of teams, eleven, making pairing everyone up impossible.
That was likely a driving force behind moving away from the setup, though it wasn’t even mentioned in August of 2023, when the Horizon League announced what it called a “modernized” approach to scheduling.
While travel partner elements were retained in some cases – individual teams still typically visit Green Bay and Milwaukee, and Detroit Mercy and Oakland over the same weekends – it has proven quite chaotic elsewhere, without any overarching logic behind most other games.
At the time of the change, the league office cited four benefits to the new approach:
- Better student-athlete experience: minimizes missed class time and maximizes recovery time.
- More sustainability: keeping strategic geographic road trips to minimize travel costs.
- More competitive equity: a team’s schedule is no longer dependent on former travel partner’s facility conflicts; minimizes extended stretches of road games and time away from home.
- Basketball excellence: better positions League champion for an improved seed path; better positions student-athletes to play at peak performance throughout the entirety of League schedule.
The first, third, and fourth points seem flat-out laughable in the aftermath of the stretch Cleveland State just concluded. Again, in the space of just ten days, the Vikings played a home game against Youngstown State, traveled to Wisconsin for their annual road games against the Phoenix and Panthers, then returned home to face Wright State.
Gottlieb’s team is set to experience something very similar between January 15th and January 24th, when it travels to CSU, then returns home for a single game, before heading right back to Northeast Ohio.
“We’ve got another deal where we go to Ohio to play Cleveland State, we fly back and play Oakland, then we go to Ohio and play Youngstown [State], and then we play Robert Morris,” he said. “Just…play the road games. Let’s be smart about it.”
How, exactly, do sequences like that contribute to maximizing recovery time, a better student-athlete experience, competitive equity, peak performance, or any of the Horizon League’s stated goals?
Kielsmeier doesn’t see a valid answer to that question.
“We need to look at this schedule,” he said after his team beat Wright State, expanding on his thoughts from Sunday. “I don’t want to get on a huge soapbox with it again, but what you ask of these kids, and what you asked of our opponent in return, there’s no equity there.”
“Why would we have to be forced to travel back from Milwaukee, get here on Monday at 3:00 in the morning, and have two days of prep for a home game? It feels like a damn road game. Again, it sounds again like it’s excuses or whatnot, but we need to look at this thing. It’s not right. It’s emotional to me because I know how I feel, and I feel for these kids and what we ask of them, and I don’t think it’s fair.”
By the way, the league’s second argument? That’s simply bragging about retaining a couple pieces of the old system.
So why not bring it back in full next season? With Northern Illinois officially joining the conference, the school roster will be back up to 12, offering everyone a partner and opening up the possibility of a bit of consistency across the board.
That certainly feels more “modern” than a random game at IU Indianapolis on a Wednesday night, four days after an entirely separate trip to Northern Kentucky, which is located less than two hours from Indy – another scheduling oddity Kielsmeier’s team will face in a couple weeks.
It even addresses Gottlieb’s primary issue, since the travel partners can play each other during a designated, well-marketed, event.
“The league has to do a better job of scheduling,” he reiterated. “When we take that next step as a league, and we build up that Rivalry Week, and then you have really competitive games, and people show up, I think [rivalries] naturally happen.”
A new leader will take over the commissioner’s chair at the Horizon League office in the near future. Here’s hoping that they have some different ideas about how the conference can best meet its objectives.
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The good news is that we are returning to twelve teams next season with Northern Illinois and 22 league games, although who would they pair up with? Green Bay would have to pair with Milwaukee, not just because they’re both in the University of Wisconsin system but because no other school us close to Green Bay, so that would likely mean alternating between Purdue Fort Wayne and IU Indy.
The “play who you want” format has been frustrating. The Horizon League is not going to be able to get anything beyond ESPN+ filler beyond the conference championship so why punish the athletes?