After Texas A&M men’s basketball’s opening game of the 2022 National Invitation Tournament against Alcorn State, coach Buzz Williams had one of the most difficult press conferences of his career. The Aggies had been left out of the 2022 NCAA Tournament, despite a resume that many bracketologists believed was better than the teams that got into the Big Dance. After days of research and a nine-page document presented to the media, Williams couldn’t understand why.

“We were and are completely devastated,” Williams said during the postgame presser. “Sad is the wrong word because it doesn’t completely express the totality of our emotions.”

THREAD: After tonight’s win over Alcorn State in the NIT, @TeamCoachBuzz distributed a nine-page document to the media of his own research and data regarding the NCAA Tournament selection process. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/SNYvtJwJHv

— TexAgs (@TexAgs) March 16, 2022

At the time, Williams was criticized for seemingly complaining about getting left out despite A&M’s flawed — like any team on the bubble — resume. The biggest knock on the Aggies? A non-conference strength of schedule ranked 308th in the country. 

Williams’ diatribe wasn’t all talk. He backed it up with action. In the three seasons since that fateful presser, A&M has seen an intentional improvement in their non-conference scheduling. 

The long-term result? This season’s 11-2 start against a grueling slate ranked 48th in the country in non-conference strength of schedule has given the Aggies six wins over power-conference competition and three Quad 1 wins so far.

That resume has them projected to land their highest seed in the Big Dance since 2007: A&M has an average projected seed of 3.84, according to the Bracketology Matrix, a site that creates a consensus out of 32 different bracketology sites.

But this year’s gauntlet is merely the end product of a process that dates back to the 2022 NCAA Tournament snub. Each year since then, the Aggies’ non-conference strength of schedule has improved from 308, to 253, to 64 and finally to this season’s 48th-toughest slate, per KenPom.com. 

A gauntlet long in the making

So what shifts a program’s focus from wins and losses to strength of schedule? The catalyst may have been the 2022 season, but it all started with the NCAA’s NET rankings.

Established in 2018 and amended in 2020, the system has become the go-to measure of a team’s chances of making the tournament field on Selection Sunday. 

Despite its name, the NET rankings aren’t a true ranking system at all. Instead, it’s more like an end-of-year sorting tool, designed to sort a team’s games into one of four quadrants.

A Quad 1 game is any team in the top 30 in the NET at home, top 50 at a neutral site and top 75 on the road. Quad 2 is any opponent ranked from 31-75 for home games, 51-100 at a neutral site and 76-135 when playing at their place. And so-on and so-forth for the remaining quadrants. It’s a system that clearly incentivizes tough scheduling and playing games away from home. 

Hence why the Aggies have played five neutral-site games against power-conference foes this season — it’s mutually beneficial to have games that maximize the chance of it being a Quad 1 game for both sides. 

Add in the fact that A&M can’t play home games at Reed Arena when it’s being used for graduations, and that eliminates the idea of a mid-December home-and-home series. In the past two seasons, A&M has faced Houston, Texas Tech and Purdue in December neutral-site contests.

Beginning with the 2022-23 season, Williams and the Aggies began building a schedule that would cater toward the committee’s focus on strength of schedule.

“In my career I’ve always felt like the conference tournament would be a part of invitations,” Williams said on his weekly radio show after A&M’s win over DePaul in the fall of 2022. “And we learned that it wasn’t. We had our non-conference schedule done before the season was over, and then after the NIT was over, we went back and changed, I think it was three games.”

Given that game contracts had already been signed by the end of the previous year, A&M was forced to buy out contracts and add whatever last-minute games they could find. The 11th-hour additions included the first leg of home-and-homes with SMU and DePaul and a neutral site battle against Boise State.

“[The non-conference schedule] abruptly changed, which is not what you want because contracts have already been signed,” Williams said. “So you have to handle the buyout, if that’s the right word, relative to the contract which is not an efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

A&M finished the year as a 7-seed, largely thanks to its 15-3 record in SEC play, but their non-conference strength of schedule did see a jump of over fifty to 253 in the country.

Last season saw Williams and his crew take the lessons they had learned to build a non-conference schedule from scratch. That schedule was the 64th-toughest in the country and one of the hardest Williams or A&M had ever played, headlined by a November stretch that saw the Aggies play six games away from Reed Arena.

“It’s what I grew up wanting to do, but it’s all in one month,” Williams said in his season-opening radio show last year. “I was thinking I’d do it across four or five years, and we’re trying to do it in four weeks.”

That schedule was enough to put the Aggies in the field as a 9-seed, despite four Quad 3 losses and 9-9 mark in SEC play. 

The gamble worked last year, so A&M scheduled even tougher opponents this season — but it hasn’t come without its costs.

“This is the least amount of home games we’ve had my whole time I’ve been here,” graduate guard Hayden Hefner said after A&M’s win over Houston Christian on Dec. 20, 2024. “On the road a whole lot, different types of schedules, traveling. It’s just, we’ve gotten into such a groove that we’re gonna need this rest, but the second we come back, we gotta do that work.”

Pros and cons

While Williams is certainly grateful for the Aggies position at this point in the year, he is quick to point out that the hard-nosed scheduling was a gamble.

“I think when you have these results, it makes it seem like, ‘Wow, that was smart,’” Williams said after A&M’s win over Purdue in Indianapolis on Dec. 14, 2024. “But also, this was a two-possession game. Texas Tech was a two-possession game. Rutgers was a two-possession game. Creighton was a two-possession game. … It can also go the other way, and when it goes the other way, numerically you may be sound as it relates to a resume, but the wear and tear is genuine.”

He also recognizes that playing such a grueling schedule has unseen challenges for the program and its players — and that the full effects of that grind won’t be seen until the end of the year.

“What I didn’t realize in signing all of these contracts was the wear and tear that this puts on your program,” Williams said. “Physically, that’s easy to figure out, but the mental and emotional fight that this takes — we’re playing all over the country. We’re playing less home games than we’ve ever played. We’re playing less Quad 4 games than we’ve ever played. … Our off days have become manna from heaven.”

Williams believes the Aggies were only able to get to this point in the season against such tough competition due to the experience A&M has: The Maroon and White’s 10 most-used players are all upperclassmen or graduates.

“Coming into this season with the maturity and the talent and the continuity of the program relative to the staff and the players, that at least gave us a chance,” Williams said during his radio show on Monday.

As A&M crafts its 2025-26 schedule, no one knows what that will look like — including Williams.

“[Special assistant to the head coach Dale] Layer, who handles our schedule, has been — in his own way — berating me to make decisions for next year’s schedule, and it’s just really hard to do a year in advance,” Williams said. “You don’t know who’s going to be on your team, you don’t know who’s going to be on their team, so many neutral site decisions now. We’ve played less home games than we’ve ever played. There’s a benefit to that, but there’s also a consequence to that. I for sure don’t think we could have done it without a lot of old people on team bus one.”