I know that Bradley has done a decent job of getting some other mid-majors to play to help their SOS, but it seems others aren't as fortunate. Good mid-major teams have problems getting games against P4 teams, so why don't they schedule other good mid-majors? Why doesn't the MVC have a set of challenge series against other mid-major conferences? You could set up series against the MAC, Mountain West, A10, etc, whoever you could get, and have ranked matchups, giving your top teams good games against other solid mid-majors. Let the commissioners decide on ranking criteria (coaches poll, media poll, etc) and match 1-1, 2-2, etc Scheduling these after you have a good idea who's going to have better teams would help you with the year to year variation in a teams competitiveness, which, given the NIL mess, can greatly change a teams outlook. Lower tier teams sometimes need to take buy games, so maybe limit this to your top 4 or 6 teams if needed.
Scheduling would be difficult, since you couldn't lock in your games years in advance, but designating dates for these challenges should help. Balancing home and away games would be tough, but doable. I believe that in the end you'd end up with a better SOS and potentially additional tier 1 and 2 games for your top teams, so the difficulties would prove to be worth it. Sure, sometimes a team doesn't meet expectations (cough cough ISU), but generally teams will end up around their ranking, so you still should get a quality game. In the end, we know the power teams are going to just continue abusing the system, so the mid-majors need to do something to help each other out as much as they can.
Scheduling would be difficult, since you couldn't lock in your games years in advance, but designating dates for these challenges should help. Balancing home and away games would be tough, but doable. I believe that in the end you'd end up with a better SOS and potentially additional tier 1 and 2 games for your top teams, so the difficulties would prove to be worth it. Sure, sometimes a team doesn't meet expectations (cough cough ISU), but generally teams will end up around their ranking, so you still should get a quality game. In the end, we know the power teams are going to just continue abusing the system, so the mid-majors need to do something to help each other out as much as they can.
