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Not even Santa Claus was as efficient as the Pepperdine men’s basketball team last December.

In the course of a week, the Waves upset local rivals UCLA and USC, staking their claim as the premier basketball team in the greater L.A. area.

Nearly a year later, Pepperdine will not have the chance to defend their erstwhile city championship.

Since facing a mid-major school on the rise like the Waves is often a risky proposition for a marquee program, both the Bruins and the Trojans decided not to schedule a game with Pepperdine this season.

“I think UCLA will play us in the future, but they are unlikely to come to Malibu,” Pepperdine head coach Paul Westphal said. “USC is a little more bothersome. They won’t play us at home or at their place anymore. It is clearly a function of us beating them last year.”

This predicament is becoming more and more common throughout college basketball, as mid-major programs continue to struggle to schedule big-name opponents.

No. 22 Tulsa, a squad that won 27 games last year and was one victory away from the Final Four in 2000, has had similar trouble finding an elite team who is willing to play them at home. The Golden Hurricane staff negotiated with Kansas head coach Roy Williams for three years before he relented, agreeing to a Dec. 11 matchup at Reynolds Gym in Tulsa, Okla., in exchange for a pair of home games in Lawrence, Kan.

“We basically had to get down on our hands and knees, and beg Kansas to come,” Tulsa head coach John Phillips said. “They have enough tough games on their schedule. They don’t need a Tulsa, but it means everything to us to be able to play them here.”

Scheduling may be the most difficult task that mid-major programs face. While a team must play strong non-conference competition in order secure an invitation to the NCAA tournament, it is often difficult to find quality opponents who are willing to venture out on the road.

Most powerhouse teams do not want to risk tarnishing their reputation by losing to a smaller school, even if that school has a successful track record like Tulsa or Pepperdine.

For those squads already in the national spotlight, it is not worth the loss of revenue to play an extra game away from home.

“It’s tough to play a mid-major school on the road because of the financial considerations,” UCLA head coach Steve Lavin said. “You have to take television into consideration. If we go on the road, it’s going to be against one of the traditional powers.”

According to UCLA Associate Athletic Director Marc Dellins, each home game generates between $200,000 and $300,000 for the Bruin athletic department depending on the opponent. UCLA tries to schedule six homes games and three road games in the preseason every year.

This year, the Bruins’ non-conference slate includes road games against No. 9 Kansas and Georgetown, and a neutral-court matchup with No. 3 Duke. The Bruins have already played the University of San Diego and Long Beach State at home, and Lavin believes that those games will pay dividends later in the season.

“I like the mid-major programs that we play,” Lavin said. “Sometimes they play a tempo that forces our kids to play defense for the full 35 seconds, exposing some of the things that teams from high-power conferences don’t expose.”

San Diego head coach Brad Holland accepts the Bruins scheduling policy more readily than most mid-major coaches might. A former assistant at UCLA under Jim Harrick from 1988-1992, Holland remembers what it was like to work in Westwood.

“We’d go on the road only when we could get national recognition,” he said. “We always looked to bring in teams to Pauley Pavilion in order to make revenue and balance the budget.”

Nonetheless, Holland is in his ninth year at the helm in San Diego, and he too has seen first-hand how difficult it to construct a balanced non-conference schedule.

“Scheduling is the most difficult thing we do at this level,” Holland said. “We’ve talked to teams like Arizona and UCLA about playing us at home, and they have said no. The reality is they don’t want to give up the revenue of home games. Why would you go to San Diego when you can make revenue from ticket sales and concessions?”

With that in mind, many mid-major programs are getting creative when it comes to scheduling.

Kent State head coach Jim Christian has virtually given up trying to schedule major-conference opponents, instead focusing on playing other elite smaller schools. This season, the Golden Flashes will try to prove last year’s run to the Elite Eight was not a flash in the pan by facing the likes of Southwestern Missouri State and Illinois State.

Furthermore, Kent State will take part in ESPN’s Bracket Buster, a one-day, nine-game slate of games on Feb. 22 featuring some of the top mid-major programs in the nation.

The event, which will be televised by ESPN, features under-exposed teams from leagues around the nation including the Mid-American Conference, Missouri Valley Conference and West Coast Conference.

“It’s a great venue and a great event,” Christian said. “We are excited to be a part of it. We were fortunate enough to get a home game, and now we have a chance to show the nation what this team is capable of.”

Pepperdine will not take part in the Bracket Buster event, but Westphal has managed to put together a very challenging schedule for his squad anyway. The Waves will face Stanford and Utah later this month, and host Oregon on Saturday, marking the first time a Pac-10 team has come to Malibu in 27 years.

Whether the squad fares well against those schools or not, Pepperdine will be hard-pressed to top last year’s historic sweep of Los Angeles.

“Beating UCLA and USC was something you couldn’t ignore,” Westphal said. “To accomplish that in the same week gave our program a lot of credibility.”

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