Questions about College Basketball and FBCB

[Icy]

I'm trialing FBCB and will buy it today. I know it's an awesome
I know about the NBA and European basket, but nothing about college basket so i need your help to explain me some stuff so i can get more inmersed in the game.

1- Online sites to learn more about college basket, rules, traditions, rivals, prestige, divisions etc. This is help a lot the inmersion factor playing with real life rivals etc.

2- What is a JUCO player?

3- Explain me the non conference games schedulle. I know that every year i need to shedulle some games, but what are the factors deciding who to choose to play against? i suppose that my position at the polls that decide the tournament playoffs depends on how hard is my schedulle and the prestige of the rivals i beat, but i'm not totally sure about who to decide this and what would be a good schedulle.

4- Related to the point before, which teams plays the playoffs? the conference leaders? the better teams at the pools? how much teams? etc.

5- Explain me the GPA meaning, i know it's related to studies, but don't underestand it well.

6- I want to play with conference movement that i know it's not realist, but should i play with limited or full movement and why?

Probably would have more questions, but this is a good start.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Here's some of them, hopefully somebody else will come along & tackle the rest.

2- What is a JUCO player?

That's shorthand for JUnior COllege player. Kids who, often, weren't academically ready for a major college/university & attended a 2-year school or "junior college" in what would have been their freshman & sophomore seasons. They enter your school with 2 years of eligibility left.

3- Explain me the non conference games schedulle.

IRL, there are several philosophies about this, ranging from playing elite competition as much as possible (to build strength of schedule) to playing all patsies that you can roll over in order to build confidence & gain playing time for your reserves/young players. In FBCB, I believe there's a rough consensus about the best way to handle this, a search through the forum here should turn up some good posts from SkyDog (among others) on the subject.

4- Related to the point before, which teams plays the playoffs? the conference leaders? the better teams at the pools? how much teams? etc.

64 teams (really 65, I'll explain later) make the "big" tournament, aka March Madness aka the NCAA Men's College Basketball Championship Tournament.
They include a number of "automatic bids" given to winners of virtually every conference and then a number of "at-large" bids, which go to the top non-conference-champions. IRL, a selection committee makes those choices, as well as arranging the seeding for the tournament. The best 32 teams who do not make the NCAA tournament are invited to the NIT aka the National Invitational Tournament. It's sort of a consolation prize for the also-rans.
Note about 64 teams being 65 -- The 64th & final spot in the NCAA tourney is filled with a "play-in game" that matches 2 champions from very weak conferences, so weak that they do not qualify for an automatic bid.
The winner of that game gets the dubious distinction of being seeded 64th, facing the best of the #1 seeds from the four brackets.

5- Explain me the GPA meaning, i know it's related to studies, but don't underestand it well.

That's abbreviation for Grade Point Average. Simply, it's the average of all the grades in all of a student's courses, assigned on a 1-4 scale (4 is the equivalent of an "A"). If you take 5 classes & get 4 A's & 1 C, that's 4+4+4+4+2 = 18 divided by 5 = 3.60 GPA

[Icy]

Thanks a lot JonInMiddleGA, i have also found that Skydog thread about FBCB strategies. Will read it now.

[CraigSca]

For college sports, you can try rivals.com or good ol' espn.com.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Icy

1- Online sites to learn more about college basket, rules, traditions, rivals, prestige, divisions etc. This is help a lot the inmersion factor playing with real life rivals etc.

The rules of the game between college and the NBA are very similar. There are some differences worth noting(and I'll probably only hit the big ones and miss a bunch here)

1) College is two 20 minute halves. NBA is 4 12 minute quarters.

Because of the lenght of the game, a couple of things are different:

2) In college you foul out with 5 fouls. It's 6 in the NBA
3) In college you don't shoot free throws(except on shooting fouls) until the 7th foul of a half. At 10 you shoot two free throws instead of a 1-and-1. NBA I believe you shoot 1-and-1 from the 5th foul on every quarter.


You can look at the FBCB universe to get a feel for which leagues are big time. All of the top prestige ones... ACC, SEC, Big East, Big Ten, Big Twelve, Pac 10, and in recent years Conference USA are the top conferences(not necessarily in that order).


Rivalries are very regional.


for non-conference stuff read Skydog's thread, he has some good stuff on how he chooses his schedule.

Jon's description of the NCAA Tournament are solid. One thing to add is that the automatic bids in almost all cases go to the winner of the conference tournament, not to the regular season champion.


The NCAA tournament is what it's all about for big programs(any team in a top prestige conference). Those top conferences get 4 teams each in every year, and sometimes as many as 6 or 7. They are not guarenteed it, but that is how the selection committee chooses most every year. A number of 2nd tier conferences can occasionally get an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament, while there are about 15 conferences who have no chance in hell of earning anything but the one automatic bid from the conference tournament.

Your goals as an FBCB coach will vary depending on what level you coach at. At any level you want to become a powerhouse team in your conference. What that accomplishes varies. If you're in the ACC, that means you're probably in the top 10 most every year nationally, and you expect to make the NCAA tournament and to have a shot at the national title every year. If you're in the Big South, that means you can hope to win your conference tournament, get a 14 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and maybe pull off an upset for the ages in the first round against one of those top schools.

[sooner333]

Originally Posted by Radii

3) In college you don't shoot free throws(except on shooting fouls) until the 7th foul of a half. At 10 you shoot two free throws instead of a 1-and-1. NBA I believe you shoot 1-and-1 from the 5th foul on every quarter.

Actually, in the NBA they shoot 2 after the 5th foul on every quarter. If you don't know what 1 and 1 is (because I don't know any levels that use it other than college and below)...it is you shoot one free shot, if you miss it, the ball is live and can be rebounded. If you make it, you get to shoot another one. This happens after the 7th, 8th, and 9th team fouls (unless it is a shooting foul, in which case the player shoots two free shots...or one if he made the shot). Then after the 10th of the half, then it is two shots for the rest of the half.

[Radii]

Shows how much NBA ball I watch.

[Pumpy Tudors]

Not to seem like I'm crapping on Jon's and Radii's comments (which are quite good), but I'd just like to correct a couple of things here:

The teams that play in the "play-in" game for the 64th spot in the tournament do play in conferences that get automatic bids. The only thing is that the two teams in the play-in game are considered the worst two from the 65-team field, so they play each other for that last spot. Perhaps I just read Jon's answer incorrectly, but it could be interpreted that the two conferences represented in the play-in game NEVER get automatic bids, which isn't true. The conferences that appear in the play-in game can change from year to year.

Also, regarding Radii's notes about foul shots, there is no "1-and-1" in the NBA at all. In the NBA, you get two shots for each team foul after #5 (or, if 5 haven't been reached, the second team foul that occurs in the final two minutes of a quarter). Radii got the college foul shot rule right, though.

Again, I'm not trying to insult these guys, as they said some very useful things. I just hoped to clear up any confusion that might've been caused.

e:f;b

Oh, well, I've been beaten on the NBA foul shot rule.