two different things came up on the college sports radio cast on Sirius XM Radio today - listening while I was in the car.
1) A concern for UCLA's future in softball based on their scheduling moving into the B1G. Unlike the Pac-12 and the SEC (13 teams in this year's tournament and OK and TX joining the conference next year which will make 15 national level teams) - that really ups the teams' standings in the ratings systems. That will NOT be there in the B1G, at least not right away. The art of scheduling - those early year tournaments and scheduling tough OOC opponents - becomes of very high importance.
2) In a different but closely related subject they also discussed the Big-12's approach to scheduling basketball this year - men's teams. They tried to schedule close to nothing but Tier One opponents. Thus even when their B-12 teams LOST those games, it didn't have much of a negative effect on the rankings of conference teams when it came to consideration for seeding in the tournament. This clearly applies to softball also.
Softball is going to find at least half if not more of their conference games to be level two or three rather than level one games. That's going to reduce our chances of achieving a top NET (or whatever they use) rating for our season making it harder in an off year to qualify for the tournament and harder to get a top seeding in a good year (as next season should be).
This same phenomenon is going to hurt women's basketball especially. It will apply to nearly half the Bruins' conference opponents (but the Pac-12 didn't exactly set the ratings on fire for men's basketball this past season so a bit less of a chance there. For women's basketball and softball, the effect could be more extreme.
The concept of UCLA and B1G as a conference taking a hard look at adopting a pointed strategic approach to scheduling was made and seems to me a solid concept