Buried deep within this Memphis Commercial-Appeal report about basketball troubles in Conference USA is a really interesting tidbit (unearthed by Jeff Eisenberg). Conference USA wants its member schools to start winning more games, thereby improving the conference's RPI and helping more of its top teams earn at-large NCAA tournament bids at the end of the season. How does the C-USA plan on doing this? The same way defeated parents motivate their kids to get good grades -- money.

According to the Commercial-Appeal's report, the league is encouraging its programs to build non-conference schedules in which those programs can win 70 percent of the non-conference games. Aside from overseeing and advising each school on ways to improve its schedule, the conference office has built a formula to distribute its postseason revenues based on winning percentage. If, say, East Carolina wins more Division I non-conference games than Rice, then East Carolina gets more money.

It's a simple strategy. It's also revolutionary. Conferences traditionally distribute postseason revenues equally, giving each team an equal share regardless of its record. This idea could work for the C-USA, as the conference desperately needs its lower tier teams to start scheduling more beatable opponents. It's certainly novel.

It doesn't sound perfect, though. One problem is a rich-getting-richer scenario, wherein Memphis, the league's dominant team, gets more postseason revenue that a program like ECU desperately needs for its other scholarship sports. There's also the peril of every team in the C-USA scheduling a completely creampuff non-conference schedule merely for the sake of postseason revenue, even if it behooves those schools to play tougher schedules based on their own individual needs.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. It's hard to imagine such a rule remaking the lower levels of the C-USA, but at this point, with the conference's middling basketball showing little signs of improvement, it's worth giving some new ideas a shot.