Tomorrow’s game last Saturday home date of the season for Iowa

It's mid-January, yet tomorrow is your last chance to watch Iowa's men's basketball team play a Saturday home game.

The Big Ten schedule sends Iowa on the road the next four weekends, then brings the Hawkeyes to Carver-Hawkeye Arena for a Sunday game before Iowa ends its weekend slate in Minnesota. It's an unusual twist of computer scheduling that aggravates Coach Todd Lickliter.

“If I told you I had input, what would you think of me if this is the schedule that came out?” Lickliter said. “The only input I have is they give it to me ... You kind of get the hand you're dealt.”

The hand Lickliter is dealt comes from a scheduling process that lasts six months. The league hires a computer company - the same one that schedules Major League Baseball - that shuffles a deck billions of times before the right combination comes out in the form of a conference schedule.

“Last year it took 18 days to develop the schedule,” said Mark Rudner, the Big Ten associate commissioner who handles scheduling. “Once we have it, then we're trying to tweak it to make it as efficient and as effective as we need it be.”

Scheduling ends with Team A hosting Team B Saturday. It begins with 22 schools, 11 arenas and 198 games that must accommodate seven core principles. The first involves strategic scheduling for television, ensuring the best games air at the best times. Every men's basketball game is televised in an exclusive window.

“That's sort of is the overriding principle that we use,” Rudner said. “Television doesn't dictate but it obviously has a very important role in determining our schedule.”

The other principles:

Each team gets at least two days to prepare for a game.

No more than two consecutive road games per school.

A balance of four or five weekday and four or five weekend games during the season's first and second halves.

A balance of four or five home and four or five road games during the first and second halves.

An arena cannot host a men's and women's game the same day.

Accommodate special requests such as concerts, premier hockey games or wrestling meets. There were 65 special requests this year.

“We take all of those scheduling principles and try to come up with a schedule that meets all of those principles,” Rudner said. “This schedule that we have this year meets those principles. Every one of them.

“The one thing that you're never going to eliminate is the coach looking at his schedule saying this isn't right, this isn't fair. It's the one thing that they don't control.”

That doesn't make Lickliter feel better. Iowa has nine Big Ten weekend games, and four of them are at home. The first three weekend dates - including today's game against Penn State - were at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. All three games were before Iowa's second semester begins Tuesday.

“We start at home with the students out, and we have a Sunday game,” Lickliter said. “It's disappointing, especially when you think about we have fans that come from quite a distance so the evening games are hard obviously. It's really important that we can have the weekend games. We just weren't given any.”

Iowa's situation is unusual but not unique. Indiana opened with three straight home weekends before playing five straight on the road. Purdue opened with two road weekend games before playing five straight at home.

“It is a daunting process, and I guess it's about this time of the year I get phone calls from coaches and e-mails from coaches,” Rudner said. “They're all sort of looking at the schedule more critically than they were back in August or September.

“We feel like we did what we're asked to do, and we have a very good schedule.”