IU better make Atlantis count because there isn’t much else on the non-conference schedule

BLOOMINGTON – As expected, Indiana’s 2024-25 nonconference schedule will be headlined by Hoosiers‘November trip to the Bahamas for the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament.

On Tuesday, we learned that Atlantis will consume most of its oxygen at this time, period.

The program announced its 11-game nonconference slate via email and social media on Tuesday. The announcement added little color to a schedule whose highlights – the three games at Atlantis and a unique visit from South Carolina – were already quite busy.

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Behind them is a lot of padding, but the reasoning behind it is interesting. Some thoughts on IU’s non-conference schedule:

Battle 4 Atlantis is better to tell

Bart Torvik’s summer projections rank the eight-team Battle 4 Atlantis field like this:

#9 Gonzaga

#10 Arizona

#31 Indiana

No. 60 Providence

#62 Louisville

#67 Oklahoma

#83 West Virginia

#157 Davidson

We don’t know the brackets yet, but if these numbers hold up (give or take the margin of error) next season, there should be some decent wins to be had on the island.

IU better enjoy it. There is very little elsewhere in the programming outside of the conference from a quality standpoint.

Of course, the Hoosiers absolutely can. Assuming they end up on the same side of the bracket as Arizona or Gonzaga, that would potentially present multiple opportunities for non-conference road wins. And since Atlantis is a neutral site, Providence, Louisville, and Oklahoma could easily be turned into valuable long-term wins (if we base this purely on preseason projections).

But outside of South Carolina coming to Bloomington, there isn’t much more weight here, and even the Gamecocks’ potential contribution is debatable. IU better be prepared to do her best work in paradise.

Value in low-calorie games?

Last winter, the Big 12 made college basketball news when sports observers realized the conference had found a way to boost its NET ranking.

The Big 12 teams have scheduled a large number of comfortable wins in non-conference games in addition to a small handful of more prestigious games. By increasing scores and improving efficiency margins against bad teams, the Big 12 beat (artificially, if you don’t mind this strategy) the NET rankings of their individual teams to such an extent that once they all reached the game in conference, their collective strength in said the standings were so good that virtually every game was an opportunity for a quality win.

The Hoosiers, by comparison, were on the opposite end of the spectrum. Their lack of efficiency, even in games against underdogs, hurt their efficiency numbers in a way that they couldn’t fix, even with a .500 conference record, and as a result, they ended up nowhere near the field of 68.

Is this, at least in part, an attempt to increase efficiency numbers? Perhaps.

Indiana still needs to win these games and win them well. And if you go back to Torvik’s projections, there are a few teams (UT-Chattanooga, Winthrop, Sam Houston State) in and around the top 150 in the country. But there may be at least some NET thinking behind it.

Manageable load

The result of Atlantis commanding so much airspace in this timeline is equally clear. Since it will require the Hoosiers to play three of their 11 non-conference games in just three days, the remainder of the schedule is comfortably spaced out.

Indiana will add the usual two Big Ten games, likely somewhere in the window between Miami (Ohio) on Dec. 6 and UT-Chattanooga on Dec. 21. But it’s still only two games in a 15-day span, meaning it’s not likely IU will play a game more often than once every four days, except at Atlantis.

Some Big Ten scheduling tips

Don’t expect the Big Ten schedule to be released before the end of August, with it being more likely sometime in September. But, of course, the shows will have at least some sense of this particular schedule before it’s formalized and revealed in full, and we can glean a few things from Indiana’s choices here.

First, the schedule certainly fits the December Big Ten window into that two-week slot before Christmas.

Second, given that IU chose to schedule a final non-conference game for December 28, it stands to reason that the Hoosiers know (or at least believe with significant confidence) that they will not restart Big Ten play for good until after the year new.

No games in Indy?

For the first time in Woodson’s tenure, Indiana does not have a game scheduled in Indianapolis.

IU played in the last Crossroads Classic in Woodson’s freshman year, then scheduled Miami (Ohio) and Harvard in years two and three, respectively. This time, with three games at Atlantis and the need to fill ticket packages with home games, there is no trip to the capital of São Paulo on the agenda.

That is, of course, unless the Big Ten Tournament ends in Indianapolis.

A conference source confirmed Tuesday that the league has not yet made a final decision on where its major basketball tournaments will be held next March after last year’s foray into Minneapolis disrupted the Indianapolis-Chicago rotation. If the Big Ten returns to Gainbridge Fieldhouse, that would solve Indy’s problem for the season.

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This article originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star: Indiana Basketball’s 2024-25 Non-Conference Schedule Looks Pretty Quiet