As we get past the halfway point in terms of schedules posted on the site, here are some games and dates to watch out for:

Of course, there aren’t always a good number of interesting games right from the opening tip. (It gets better when championship games of tipoff tournaments roll around on the second and third day of the season.) However, Nov. 18 features one of last year’s cinderella teams vs. one of this year’s national title favorites when Texas-Dallas and Illinois Wesleyan face off at Wabash’s tournament. Gwynedd-Mercy’s women face Trinity (Texas) at Marymount’s tipoff tournament, and we’ll be broadcasting the first round and winner’s bracket of that event, which includes tournament contenders such as the two mentioned above, the host team, Wesleyan and King’s.

Circle Nov. 21: Texas Lutheran’s women play Schreiner in what is the earliest conference game we’ve seen. The next day Montclair State plays New Jersey City, Rutgers-Newark plays Ramapo and Richard Stockton plays Rutgers-Camden. Presumably Rowan, TCNJ and the other NJAC schools play too, but who knows when we’ll find out.

By the way, Schreiner, of the record losing streak snapped in February, plays three Division I schools. Hope the payoff is good.

Circle Dec. 6. It’s when Tom Murphy returns to Hamilton as head coach of SUNYIT. Hamilton was pushed out the door at the end of the 2003-04 season after winning a mere 600 career games. He landed as an assistant to one of his former players at SUNYIT and when he stepped aside to focus on his athletic director role, Murphy was hired.

Circle Dec. 20. Hanover travels to Illinois Wesleyan. This game has been too good to miss in recent years, whether regular season or NCAA Tournament.

Circle Dec. 21. Lincoln’s men will be playing their fourth consecutive game on that day, in two different states. They leave campus probably on Dec. 17 and play at Randolph-Macon on the 18th, either Lake Erie or St. John Fisher at Macon’s tournament on the 19th, then travel to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and play Christopher Newport and Greensboro on the 20th and 21st. Such is the life of an independent.

Circle Jan. 8, in pencil. We could see a rematch from the 2001 Sweet 16 as Brockport State and Catholic would play in Catholic’s tournament, should they both advance. Or somehow both lose, to Eastern and Drew respectively.

Circle Jan. 10 and 11. It’s the day the Chase Scholarship Tournaments start for women and men, respectively. This event features seven Division III teams (and, unfortunately, one NAIA team) in the Rochester, N.Y., area. Championship games are Jan. 14.

Circle Jan. 20. It’s the date Carnegie Mellon plays its first home men’s basketball game since Dec. 6, a span of 45 days. In between they visit upstate New York (Skidmore and Union), New Jersey (Princeton), western Ohio (Bluffton), Boston (Brandeis), Manhattan (NYU) and the Tidewater area of Virginia (Christopher Newport).

Circle Jan. 21. That’s when Rust plays its 12th regional game of the 2005-06 season, equalling Chapman’s total from the entirety of 2004-05. In fact, with regulations coming in that require a school to play regional opponents in at least one-half of its schedule, it’s time Chapman gets with the program. Rust is in a similarly difficult situation to Chapman — geographically isolated and one of only a couple of independents for miles around, yet it’s getting it done.

Circle Feb. 4. It’s the date UW-Eau Claire and Finlandia’s men play, possibly for the third time. Eau Claire hosts the team from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on Dec. 12 and Finlandia plays in Eau Claire’s Dec. 29-30 tournament (the Lions play Northland in the opener). Even if they don’t play each other in the tournament, expect the teams to be scouting each other.

Feb. 4 is also the day Wooster and Wittenberg meet for the second time. The game at Wooster’s Timken Gymnasium should be a blast, too, but it’s on Dec. 10, in the first semester. This game is right in the heart of the conference season and should be well worth your while.

Circle Feb. 11. UC Santa Cruz’s women’s team plays its last regular season game (against University of Dallas at Colorado College). Although they might participate in the western regional independents “conference” tournament, that’s an early ending to the season. Such is life as an indpendent. Maybe I already said that.

And circle Feb. 24. It’s the date the CCIW men’s basketball tournament starts, the first one ever.

There will be more, I’m sure, when we get more schedules in. What dates are you circling?

At this writing, we only have about 20% of the 2005-06 Division III basketball schedule posted. We’ve received slightly more than that, but can’t post it because it doesn’t include tournament pairings. (We’ve found it takes significantly more effort to post TBA pairings and change them later, and if we leave the tournament out entirely, there’s a chance the schedule may register as complete and never get finished.)

What all this gets at is how schools decide who they will play in the first round of a tournament it hosts. The prevailing opinion used to be that you should schedule the easiest cupcake possible in the first round to guarantee you get to the championship. (In some fields, it’s hard to discern flavors of cupcake.) However, the recent numerical emphasis on the selection and seeding of the NCAA Tournament field should bring about a shift in this policy. It no longer makes sense to play your weakest opponent in a first-round game, if it’s one that would get you eight points in the Quality of Wins index (formerly SOSI). At-large playoff selections have usually come in at 10.0 or higher in QoW.

Instead, consider this hypothetical field:

You’re a perennial playoff team in a relatively weak conference, hosting a tournament. You’ve got a weak team that is an in-region game, a strong team that is in-region and a better than average team that is out of region. Normally, you’d pick the weak team. But here’s why you shouldn’t.

Take the out of region team. They’re pretty decent, will be a good test but a team you should beat, especially given the long trip. And make your fellow regional contender play the weak team. You should make the final anyway, and you will lower your rival’s QoW in the process by giving them the bad opponent. Your rival will get a regional win, however, which could raise your QoW in the process.

Now, there’s no guarantee you’ll win that title game against the strong regional rival, but you were likely to play them in the final anyway!

In essence, doing something like this means you are playing the No. 3 seed in your tournament instead of the No. 4. If you’re a good team, you can handle that.

So if you’re a coach and you’re still debating your tournament matchups, get it done. We need your schedule.