(04-28-2020 11:21 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 08:16 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:59 AM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:41 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  Does anyone have a subscription to d1baseball.com? Because from the free preview, it's not so much "CAA, Big East and A-10" as "UConn's baseball coach threw the idea out to the other Big East baseball coaches and no one objected."

I think the idea has a lot of merit, and this is the sort of thing you want a blanket NCAA waiver for. But I'm curious if this is a thing that the conferences are working on, a thing that the coaches and ADs are arranging and getting the conferences to give their blessing to, or just a half-assed idea that one coach had and the other coaches nodded along.

Great question, JBragg. Since UConn and St. John's both have strong baseball, this is a potentially interesting development. You would hope there had been some back-channel discussion before the UConn coach mentioned the concept for the article.

I think the Big Est baseball coaches' conference call WAS the backchannel. And when the questions are about playing the season or not, RPI in a nonrevenue sport isn't going to move the needle much.

It's a solid idea, there are pretty reasonable groupings.
Western Group(9)--Creighton, SLU, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Dayton, Duquesne, maybe St Bonaventure (no really good spot for St Bona)
Northern Group(9)--Northeastern, UMass, URI, Providence, UConn, St Johns, Fordham, Hofstra, Seton Hall
Middle Group (8)--Villanova, St Joes, LaSalle, Drexel, Delaware, Towson, GW, Georgetown
Southern Group (8)--George Mason, Richmond, VCU, JMU, William & Mary, UNC-Wilmingon, Davidson, Elon

There is always some weirdness at the borders (Not sure Duquesne is traveling any less? George Mason and GW students can share apartments. And St Bonaventure is a rough trip for just about anybody) but you can slice the group at the Appalachians, at the Delaware and Potomac rivers and you're done.

The Midwestern group probably already plays each other in most non-revenue sports. If they don't, it's because they play even closer schools.

The main advantage would be to NOT have to fly & play all the Eastern teams.

Right. We're probably looking at fewer games to start with, so instead of Xavier playing @Dayton, @Villanova and Villanova, they're playing Dayton and @Dayton. Xavier is 2-hour-drivable to Dayton and Butler, 6-hour-drivable to SLU, Duquesne, Marquette, DePaul and even St Bonaventure. (Creighton, whaddayagonnado?)

Conference tournaments and championships--maybe?

Further thoughts--is a 6 hour bus ride really a better idea than a 4 hour bus-to-plane-to-bus ride? It's cheaper, but is it less Corona-riffic?

(04-28-2020 08:16 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:59 AM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:41 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  Does anyone have a subscription to d1baseball.com? Because from the free preview, it's not so much "CAA, Big East and A-10" as "UConn's baseball coach threw the idea out to the other Big East baseball coaches and no one objected."

I think the idea has a lot of merit, and this is the sort of thing you want a blanket NCAA waiver for. But I'm curious if this is a thing that the conferences are working on, a thing that the coaches and ADs are arranging and getting the conferences to give their blessing to, or just a half-assed idea that one coach had and the other coaches nodded along.

Great question, JBragg. Since UConn and St. John's both have strong baseball, this is a potentially interesting development. You would hope there had been some back-channel discussion before the UConn coach mentioned the concept for the article.

I think the Big Est baseball coaches' conference call WAS the backchannel. And when the questions are about playing the season or not, RPI in a nonrevenue sport isn't going to move the needle much.

It's a solid idea, there are pretty reasonable groupings.
Western Group(9)--Creighton, SLU, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Dayton, Duquesne, maybe St Bonaventure (no really good spot for St Bona)
Northern Group(9)--Northeastern, UMass, URI, Providence, UConn, St Johns, Fordham, Hofstra, Seton Hall
Middle Group (8)--Villanova, St Joes, LaSalle, Drexel, Delaware, Towson, GW, Georgetown
Southern Group (8)--George Mason, Richmond, VCU, JMU, William & Mary, UNC-Wilmingon, Davidson, Elon

There is always some weirdness at the borders (Not sure Duquesne is traveling any less? George Mason and GW students can share apartments. And St Bonaventure is a rough trip for just about anybody) but you can slice the group at the Appalachians, at the Delaware and Potomac rivers and you're done.

No reason to exclude College of Charleston. They fit well with the Southern Group.

Have a son who played club sports (ultimate frisbee) competitively for Georgetown. The geographic boundaries for regional competition is Carolinas to Delaware. Regional tournaments always included teams from multiple NCAA D1 conferences: A-10, ACC, BE, BIG, CAA, etc.

(04-28-2020 11:14 AM)Wahoowa84 Wrote:  There is a good article in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer interviewing A-10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade. In brief, “the league is working through a full series of contingencies for the fall season”. Initially, the focus of the article is on the potential of moving fall sports to the spring.

The informative quote: “‘...there’s this natural concern of travel,’ McGlade said. ‘We are a flight conference. We do a lot of flying, for our Olympic sports, as well as both the [men’s and women’s] basketball sports. Part of the contingency planning is a potential 25 percent reduction in our conference schedules so that we could align more of a regional schedule. We’ve also kept on the drawing board the potential of doing some regional competitions if we needed to with neighboring Division 1 conferences...’”

Minimizing air travel is now a factor.

I guess the fall sports other than cross country and football could be moved to spring, although there could be facility issues and a few multi-sport athlete issues. Football can't be played in the winter and summer is dangerous. Cross-country would conflict with track.
Field hockey, volleyball, soccer and water polo don't have to be in the fall.

(04-28-2020 11:47 AM)Wahoowa84 Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 08:16 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:59 AM)bill dazzle Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 07:41 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  Does anyone have a subscription to d1baseball.com? Because from the free preview, it's not so much "CAA, Big East and A-10" as "UConn's baseball coach threw the idea out to the other Big East baseball coaches and no one objected."

I think the idea has a lot of merit, and this is the sort of thing you want a blanket NCAA waiver for. But I'm curious if this is a thing that the conferences are working on, a thing that the coaches and ADs are arranging and getting the conferences to give their blessing to, or just a half-assed idea that one coach had and the other coaches nodded along.

Great question, JBragg. Since UConn and St. John's both have strong baseball, this is a potentially interesting development. You would hope there had been some back-channel discussion before the UConn coach mentioned the concept for the article.

I think the Big Est baseball coaches' conference call WAS the backchannel. And when the questions are about playing the season or not, RPI in a nonrevenue sport isn't going to move the needle much.

It's a solid idea, there are pretty reasonable groupings.
Western Group(9)--Creighton, SLU, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Dayton, Duquesne, maybe St Bonaventure (no really good spot for St Bona)
Northern Group(9)--Northeastern, UMass, URI, Providence, UConn, St Johns, Fordham, Hofstra, Seton Hall
Middle Group (8)--Villanova, St Joes, LaSalle, Drexel, Delaware, Towson, GW, Georgetown
Southern Group (8)--George Mason, Richmond, VCU, JMU, William & Mary, UNC-Wilmingon, Davidson, Elon Charleston

There is always some weirdness at the borders (Not sure Duquesne is traveling any less? George Mason and GW students can share apartments. And St Bonaventure is a rough trip for just about anybody) but you can slice the group at the Appalachians, at the Delaware and Potomac rivers and you're done.

No reason to exclude College of Charleston. They fit well with the Southern Group.

Have a son who played club sports (ultimate frisbee) competitively for Georgetown. The geographic boundaries for regional competition is Carolinas to Delaware. Regional tournaments always included teams from multiple NCAA D1 conferences: A-10, ACC, BE, BIG, CAA, etc.

Whoops. Will fix.

(04-28-2020 11:36 AM)johnbragg Wrote:  Further thoughts--is a 6 hour bus ride really a better idea than a 4 hour bus-to-plane-to-bus ride? It's cheaper, but is it less Corona-riffic?

If we assume that teams aren't flying their softball and track teams charter? Yea, it's better because you're avoiding going through two separate airports, twice each, and sitting on a plane at least partially full of strangers twice. If the bus has a bathroom on it you can basically load the team on at campus and keep them sealed away from the world till you get where you're going.

(04-28-2020 06:25 AM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  Wouldn’t it be interesting if COVID brings about a bunch of regional, single sport conferences for non-revenue sports or more of these MPSF type deals where multiple conferences go in together to create regional play for their non-revenue sports.

Maybe we get to the point where your primary conference is just where you park your M/W basketball and possibly football.

On several occasions, I have suggested it would be wise of the NCAA to make a complete break from football, both regular season and post season. They would just hang on to all the other sports.

Now, I'm thinking about turning that on its head. Let the NCAA only concern itself with D-I football and basketball, and drop its sponsorship of all other sports and all other divisions. Raise the bar for membership by charging much higher dues to encourage bottom dwellers to drop out because the cost of dues is greater than what they now get from the NCAAT. Let each sport police itself (and pay for itself).

Are they talking about regional play in lieu of conference play, or regional play for OOC games?

AFAIR (though no time to look it up in the manual now), if you divisionalize a team sport, you don't have to have ANY cross division games in the regular conference schedule. A championship tournament drawn from the top "n" from both divisions and seeded by division is perfectly fine as far as generating a tournament champion for an NCAA autobid conference.

So you could use this to have a "division only" conference schedule and fill out the (much larger) OOC slate of games from the cross-conference scheduling agreement.

Conferences in the east definitely should do this.

If D-I schools in the west want to minimize plane travel for Olympic sports, they ought to be asking the NCAA to reduce any minimum required number of contests in a sport against other D-I teams, so that they could schedule a few games against D-II or D-III teams in sports where there are few teams within driving distance. Look at this map to see how few D-I teams there are in some sports in parts of the west that are not near the Pacific coast: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/rese...er-schools

Also ought to think about playing two games in a season against the same opponent in sports where you'd typically play each opponent only once. In baseball and softball, play a lot more games against opponents close enough that you can eliminate both plane flights and overnight hotel stays.

More regional play works on a lot of levels: lowers cost, makes scheduling easier and reduces potential health risk (presumed from air travel).

The down-side is that the level of competition is not as uniform. Schools with powerhouse athletic programs prefer a broader geography in order to better sharpen their skills.

(04-27-2020 10:39 PM)leofrog Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:26 PM)BePcr07 Wrote:  This really doesn’t help the midwestern schools quite as much: Creighton, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Saint Louis, Dayton, and Duquesne. 35 schools and 8 in the Midwest. I guess if they do multiple games in a week on the road then it could be helpful.

But the article said they were looking into other conferences, so leagues like the MVC, Horizon, MAC could be brought in.

I have an idea that includes D2 schools as well. The Grand Valley State, Wayne State, Mich., Davenport, Indianapolis, Southern Indiana and the likes can be grandfathered into D1 for the next couple of years to help schools like Central Michigan and the likes. Could put them in the Horizon as a temp. The large Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Arkansas schools could slip in the MVC, Summit and Southland as temp. Northern Sun schools and RMAC large schools temp in Summit and Big Sky. Same with the GNAC, RMAC and CCAA for the west coast. Still trying to schedule alliance, you still have schools that are further away which would require some D2 schools to be D1 temp. I would not be surprise that some D2 schools get invited to D1, and the landscape that some D2 could close? Some of the top schools would find a safe landing at D1.

(04-28-2020 03:15 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:39 PM)leofrog Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:26 PM)BePcr07 Wrote:  This really doesn’t help the midwestern schools quite as much: Creighton, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Saint Louis, Dayton, and Duquesne. 35 schools and 8 in the Midwest. I guess if they do multiple games in a week on the road then it could be helpful.

But the article said they were looking into other conferences, so leagues like the MVC, Horizon, MAC could be brought in.

I have an idea that includes D2 schools as well.

Of course you do.

What you're saying here is less ridiculous than usual, but if anything, instead of declaring some D-2 schools temporarily D-1 (disrupting D-2 and creating a situation in a couple of years where you have to send them back or make them permanent ), the easier thing to do is just allow D-1 schools to schedule more non-Division-I schools and have them count for scheduling.

(04-28-2020 03:15 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:39 PM)leofrog Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:26 PM)BePcr07 Wrote:  This really doesn’t help the midwestern schools quite as much: Creighton, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Saint Louis, Dayton, and Duquesne. 35 schools and 8 in the Midwest. I guess if they do multiple games in a week on the road then it could be helpful.

But the article said they were looking into other conferences, so leagues like the MVC, Horizon, MAC could be brought in.

I have an idea that includes D2 schools as well. The Grand Valley State, Wayne State, Mich., Davenport, Indianapolis, Southern Indiana and the likes can be grandfathered into D1 for the next couple of years to help schools like Central Michigan and the likes. Could put them in the Horizon as a temp. The large Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Arkansas schools could slip in the MVC, Summit and Southland as temp. Northern Sun schools and RMAC large schools temp in Summit and Big Sky. Same with the GNAC, RMAC and CCAA for the west coast. Still trying to schedule alliance, you still have schools that are further away which would require some D2 schools to be D1 temp. I would not be surprise that some D2 schools get invited to D1, and the landscape that some D2 could close? Some of the top schools would find a safe landing at D1.

I like this idea a lot and would love to see what it looks like all mapped/written out. I'm tempted to do so myself.

(04-28-2020 03:41 PM)johnbragg Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 03:15 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:39 PM)leofrog Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:26 PM)BePcr07 Wrote:  This really doesn’t help the midwestern schools quite as much: Creighton, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Saint Louis, Dayton, and Duquesne. 35 schools and 8 in the Midwest. I guess if they do multiple games in a week on the road then it could be helpful.

But the article said they were looking into other conferences, so leagues like the MVC, Horizon, MAC could be brought in.

I have an idea that includes D2 schools as well.

Of course you do.

What you're saying here is less ridiculous than usual, but if anything, instead of declaring some D-2 schools temporarily D-1 (disrupting D-2 and creating a situation in a couple of years where you have to send them back or make them permanent ), the easier thing to do is just allow D-1 schools to schedule more non-Division-I schools and have them count for scheduling.

We already have D2 schools in D1 already. D1 could take over D2 championships for baseball, wrestling, softball, women's wrestling, men's volleyball, women's volleyball, golf and tennis.

(04-28-2020 02:40 PM)Wedge Wrote:  Conferences in the east definitely should do this.

If D-I schools in the west want to minimize plane travel for Olympic sports, they ought to be asking the NCAA to reduce any minimum required number of contests in a sport against other D-I teams, so that they could schedule a few games against D-II or D-III teams in sports where there are few teams within driving distance. Look at this map to see how few D-I teams there are in some sports in parts of the west that are not near the Pacific coast: http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/rese...er-schools

Also ought to think about playing two games in a season against the same opponent in sports where you'd typically play each opponent only once. In baseball and softball, play a lot more games against opponents close enough that you can eliminate both plane flights and overnight hotel stays.

We good here, Wedge

(04-28-2020 03:49 PM)bhutchcraft89 Wrote:  

(04-28-2020 03:15 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:39 PM)leofrog Wrote:  

(04-27-2020 10:26 PM)BePcr07 Wrote:  This really doesn’t help the midwestern schools quite as much: Creighton, DePaul, Marquette, Butler, Xavier, Saint Louis, Dayton, and Duquesne. 35 schools and 8 in the Midwest. I guess if they do multiple games in a week on the road then it could be helpful.

But the article said they were looking into other conferences, so leagues like the MVC, Horizon, MAC could be brought in.

I have an idea that includes D2 schools as well. The Grand Valley State, Wayne State, Mich., Davenport, Indianapolis, Southern Indiana and the likes can be grandfathered into D1 for the next couple of years to help schools like Central Michigan and the likes. Could put them in the Horizon as a temp. The large Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Arkansas schools could slip in the MVC, Summit and Southland as temp. Northern Sun schools and RMAC large schools temp in Summit and Big Sky. Same with the GNAC, RMAC and CCAA for the west coast. Still trying to schedule alliance, you still have schools that are further away which would require some D2 schools to be D1 temp. I would not be surprise that some D2 schools get invited to D1, and the landscape that some D2 could close? Some of the top schools would find a safe landing at D1.

I like this idea a lot and would love to see what it looks like all mapped/written out. I'm tempted to do so myself.

++++++

The people who hate on it are just jealous because they didn't have the vision to come up with it themselves.

Perhaps the MEAC, Big South, A-Sun, and maybe even the SoCon should consider going in together and doing something similar.

....aaaand we circle back to the whole reason conferences were regional to begin with!

Baseball is talking about realigning for next year and starting in July, limiting itself to regional play.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ml...039275001/
"...MLB is considering a three-division, 10-team plan in which teams play only within their division – a concept gaining support among owners and executives. It would abolish the traditional American and National Leagues, and realign the divisions based on geography...."