armchair
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The Vols released their 2017 soccer schedule today. See link below.
The non-conference schedule is weak. We play Belmont, Middle Tennessee, George Mason, College of Charleston, Navy, Bucknell, Wright State, East Tennessee and Wright State. Yikes. Not exactly a collection of bruisers. A couple of those games might be oriented toward recruiting as the Vols recruit pretty heavily in the northern Virginia/Maryland area and in Pennsylvania. The problem is that most of them will be low RPI opponents, and you don't get much RPI help for beating low RPI teams. And if you lose to a low-RPI team, you get hammered. So there's not a lot of upside and quite a lot of downside to a schedule like this. I mean, a weak out-of-conference schedule is almost always going to depress your RPI, and that's not a good thing when the time comes for a committee to pick NCAA teams.
The only decent non-conference game we have is against Virginia Tech, which is a good ACC team though not upper-tier ACC. That almost becomes a must-win, it seems to me. Last year we played a very good BYU team, and a decent Washington team, and lost both games. I'd rather we played some tougher competition, frankly.
The SEC schedule is, as usual, stout. We will have to have quite a good regular season and conference tournament to make the NCAA tourney, which we haven't been in for a while. Here's hoping for a strong team and a good year.
http://www.utsports.com/sports/w-soccer/sched/
The non-conference schedule is weak. We play Belmont, Middle Tennessee, George Mason, College of Charleston, Navy, Bucknell, Wright State, East Tennessee and Wright State. Yikes. Not exactly a collection of bruisers. A couple of those games might be oriented toward recruiting as the Vols recruit pretty heavily in the northern Virginia/Maryland area and in Pennsylvania. The problem is that most of them will be low RPI opponents, and you don't get much RPI help for beating low RPI teams. And if you lose to a low-RPI team, you get hammered. So there's not a lot of upside and quite a lot of downside to a schedule like this. I mean, a weak out-of-conference schedule is almost always going to depress your RPI, and that's not a good thing when the time comes for a committee to pick NCAA teams.
The only decent non-conference game we have is against Virginia Tech, which is a good ACC team though not upper-tier ACC. That almost becomes a must-win, it seems to me. Last year we played a very good BYU team, and a decent Washington team, and lost both games. I'd rather we played some tougher competition, frankly.
The SEC schedule is, as usual, stout. We will have to have quite a good regular season and conference tournament to make the NCAA tourney, which we haven't been in for a while. Here's hoping for a strong team and a good year.
http://www.utsports.com/sports/w-soccer/sched/