conferences setting their scheduled well in advance have to do with TV coverage? They may be set well in advance (February for ACC FB and September for ACC MBB), all without TV coverage which doesn't get fleshed out until somewhat later. I know because I monitor both in anticipation and in preparation for my archive spreadsheets, having to revisit our VaSports.com schedule multiple times before getting all the TV coverage.

TV coverage for some of our MBB games still aren't set, and many of them have multiple possibilities listed, e.g., ESPN[2|U], so do, of course other schools. All of which is determined by TV execs after well into the season but also early on after preseason college football and men's basketball predictions/rankings and publications have been spewing out for months (e.g., CFB publications start coming out in May), although maybe not the ACC Sports Writers Association, or whatever it's called now. That's always a relatively late announcement. Of course, for ACC MBB, it's always a given that Dook and UNC-CHeat are gonna get the primo TV coverage year in and year out, because that's just the way it's always been, even if other All Carolina Conference teams actually have loftier preseason predictions.

TV execs and pollsters don't operate in a vacuum and are largely just lemmings following the crowd and its eyeballs. Of course, like everybody else, they're influence by preseason hype, predictions, and rankings. The polls themselves are even a prime example of that, with it being nearly impossible for a team to get ranked early on if they aren't ranked in the preseason, and almost as hard to drop in the polls if they are.

And, of course, all ranked teams automatically get additional coverage, whether they deserve their ranking or not. It's the advantage of being ranked.