The way I understand it, they are tired of getting just one team into the Tournament each year, so they want their top teams to play tougher schedules in hopes of getting more than one.

It's a 14 team league and what they are going to do is play the first 14 conference games: 1 against each other opponent plus one against a designated rival team that they play home and away every year.

Then AFTER the 14th conference game, they will group the teams 1-5, 6-10, and 11-14 based on the standings. The remaining four games of the season will be against teams in their groups. So the last two weeks of February won't be scheduled until mid February. You'll have four TBD games on the schedule which will be against the other teams in your group and the opponents won't be known until just before the games are played.

That way the top 5 teams will get games against each other to toughen up their strength of schedule, and I guess they are hoping that two teams will emerge from that with a strong enough resume to make the dance.

BUT they don't want this to unfairly affect the seeding for their own conference tournament so they won't allow teams 1-5 to drop below 5th, and teams 6-10 will stay seeded 6-10 in the tournament, and 11-12 will make the tournament and 13-14 will not.

(Example: if a two teams are 8-6 and tied for 5th and 6th after 14 games, one will be #5 based on a tiebreaker, and the other will be #6. Even if #6 goes 4-0 playing the other 6-10 teams and finishes 12-6, and team 5 goes 0-4 vs the 1-5 teams and finishes 8-10, team 5 will still be a 5 seed in the conference).

The whole thing seems ridiculous to me and I don't think it's going to "fool" the committee into taking a team. And it will be odd with conference games listed as TBD on the schedule until February. I don't know if they can even sell tickets to those games in advance (other than season tickets) because would they even know the dates?

It's just kind of bizarre.