NCAA D1 Qualfying idea to make these large invite XC meets entertaining

50% of the teams that qualify for nationals have no trouble getting past the regional meet. There is still no incentive for them to race for a W early in the season.

And if Stanford locks up a bye to the national meet, does that mean an extra team from the West will get in because Stanford will not compete at the region?

I think the system now is pretty good. It creates some Cinderella teams and the regional meets are very important/entertaining. The only change I would make is that you get a Kolas point for beating a team at any time, regardless of the squad does not end up being the 'A' team. If a team registers for a meet, and it is the only said of theirs running that weekend, it is by default the A team. If they are split between two meets or enter two squads at an invite, then they get to specify which is the A team, but they cannot claim both are B or C teams.

If you want to make XC interesting and the meets mean something here's what you do:

Make them actually count- Doesn't matter if it's your top 7 at regionals or 7 guys you line up. That counts as your team. Anytime you race as a team counts.

Go local-

3 "local" meets + 1 big invite + conference

That should be everyones schedule.

In order to qualify for regionals, the 3 local meets count. Wins and losses, top 12 teams qualify based on wins/losses.

Top 2 teams at each of maybe 5 designated big invites throughout the year on a specific weekend get an automatic bye to nationals. Same with individuals, place top 5, bye to nationals.

Individually- Top 15 athletes in combined placing at 3 local meets, not on a team that qualifies, qualify for regionals. Determined by placings at local meets, of if you finish top 25 at a big meet.

Regionals to nationals- Top 2 teams in each region. If your region got an auto invite, you get another team to nationals.

At the end of this, top team in each "region" gets a bye to nationals.

Not perfect, but some combination of it. Just threw out numbers. Every meet should count. Every one during the regular season.

Idea wrote:

I think sometime in the near future there will be an altercation to the nationals qualifying system.

An interesting place to use the word altercation.

I'll vouch for your system if you can give a good answer to this question:

Why should the regular season meets be so important?

From another thread:

This discussion is why many college fans consider XC a strange overrated sport that warrants little respect and a small budget. (how much did that trip to Minnesota cost?)

As of this weekend; both the Notre Dame and USC-west football coaches are in big trouble and they can not make the play-offs or a big major bowl.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Men's coach can have his team run like absolute crap on 9/24; and still make Nationals in November and finish in the top 10 at that meet. It is hard to respect the coaching or the sport, at times !

East End wrote:

I'll vouch for your system if you can give a good answer to this question:

Why should the regular season meets be so important?

Because why is cross country the only sport where the regular season has no impact on the post season. Would anyone watch regular season NFL, MLB, NBA, or NCAA basketball/football games if they meant nothing. Probably not, so maybe that's the reason why XC/track can't get the same fan base as those sports or even a fraction of their fan base. I just think they should be important to give fans some more entertainment in the season, and possibly give an advantage to teams at nationals who take these meets seriously. I've read comments today complaining about who sat out, who ran, who lost, and who won. Why not put some actual value on these meets.

I like the idea of qualifying via regular season meets, but you should qualify to regionals, not nationals. You still have to show up in the "semi-finals" to make the finals. I wouldn't mind, though, having regionals be a meet you have to qualify for. Major meets could to have their winner or top two or three or whatever get a slot at regionals, and any team that can pick one up at some point gets to race reg's. Conference meet winners also, and there could be a way for individuals to qualify if their team doesn't. It just never sat well with me that you just go through your season including conference and then everybody gets to go to regionals and try for nationals.

Idea wrote:

East End wrote:

I'll vouch for your system if you can give a good answer to this question:

Why should the regular season meets be so important?

Because why is cross country the only sport where the regular season has no impact on the post season. Would anyone watch regular season NFL, MLB, NBA, or NCAA basketball/football games if they meant nothing. Probably not, so maybe that's the reason why XC/track can't get the same fan base as those sports or even a fraction of their fan base. I just think they should be important to give fans some more entertainment in the season, and possibly give an advantage to teams at nationals who take these meets seriously. I've read comments today complaining about who sat out, who ran, who lost, and who won. Why not put some actual value on these meets.

I understand your point. The regular season creates the backdrop to the championship season: who wil qualify, who are the favorites, etc.

But if the NBA, NFL, MLb had a more effecient way to determine that than a 1 v 1 matchup, wouldn't they take it? Well no, because the regular season is for money grabbing. But the coaches and players would. But that's not the case for XC.

Put another way, to answer your question, XC is the only sport where you don't have to decide those worthy to compete for a title by head-to-head matchups. What is wrong with that? Do you want more inefficiency in the system?

Change to the DII qualifying system 3 Auto-bids from each region, then 8 "at-large bids" based off of the previous years national results. If a region has a team finish in the top 8 at nationals then they get 1 of the at-large bids for the next year, if they have 2 teams they get 2, and so on. This gives teams that are in an extremely tough region a chance to get out and compete at the national meet while there are some DI teams that get out that would not have a chance at getting top 25 at "baby-nats"

Your underlying assumption is wrong. You see sport as the goal to find out who is best. It's not. The best NBA, NFL, NHL team does not always win.

Sport is about entertainment.

Track/CC doesn't get this.

Our meets have ZERO meaning until nationals.

That's efficient, but it does not many for a compelling sport to follow.

It is something like that. When the best team/runner doesn't always win then fans and second tier teams get to watch or compete to achieve upsets.

"Your underlying assumption is wrong. You see sport as the goal to find out who is best. It's not. The best NBA, NFL, NHL team does not always win.

Sport is about entertainment.

Track/CC doesn't get this.

Our meets have ZERO meaning until nationals.

That's efficient, but it does not many for a compelling sport to follow."

I think you could have something like a 256 team XC tournament. This would make everyone at least theoretically vulnerable for all of Oct and November. The seeding meeting would generate early season interest and try to balance four regions with what is known from last year, track results and early Sept races. There would be lots of theories as to how much effort to put into early season meets. Then have "dual" meets to whittle down to 128, 64 and 32 on say Sept 30, Oct 15 and Oct 30.

The Sept 30 races would be David and Goliath dual meets but would let the bottom half see where they stand. Balancing the regions of 64 would be hard but teams on the bubble would be challenged to go out and race early to make the 64 and get rankings that would let them go further in the tournament. There would also be some really tight races between #32 and #33 in each region. Even races between #24 and #41 or #12 and #53 could be tight and matter if #12 was trying to train through and #53 was peaking. As dual meets, home course advantage would matter.

The Oct 15 races could be run as multiple dual meets in the same race so they would still retain some of the conference atmosphere but only the exact matched team of your bracket could knock you out. The conference like meets would still have conference rivals from the local areas and there would likely be 16 of them with 8 teams.

The four Oct 30 races would be 16 team affairs that would determine 8 regional representatives to a 32 team national race. I still think these should be dual meets for the knock out but there are also good reasons to make them top 8 in 16 team field go to national.

This plan has lots of season ending drama all through October. For the top 32 teams it would mean 3 hard races, just like conference, regional and nationals now. It wouldn't get in the way of small rust busters or invitationals in Sept to set you up for the October season. You could have NIT tournament like invitationals for the teams that have been knocked out.

The problem is too many teams make the NCAA final.

The beauty of team sports is that the final has two teams competing against each other.

No more than 8 teams should make the final. And no individual qualifiers. We need to make up our minds whether XC is a team event or an individual one. I say once and for all it's a team sport.

There could be additional meets, which would be like the abundance of NCAA Bowl games, or the NIT in college basketball.

Just like the football BCS system, you get dozens of "Championships" in addition to conferences. That means more revenue for the schools that host these meets, more interest for programs that would otherwise not qualify for NCAAs or would finish in the bottom 15 teams.

How you determine the qualifiers, I don't know.

Your 'team only' rule would simply have more schools dropping XC.The NCAA likes big events with lots of teams - they are easier to market. This is the same org considering increasing the size of the BB tourney to 128. To get the 'regular season' in xc to mean something you would have to have an agreement across multiple conferences and that's not going to happen.The basic problem is that everyone and anyone can line up at the regional meet. Should be conference champs and then at large bids earned via regional/national competition.

Lenny Leonard wrote:

The problem is too many teams make the NCAA final.

The beauty of team sports is that the final has two teams competing against each other.

No more than 8 teams should make the final. And no individual qualifiers. We need to make up our minds whether XC is a team event or an individual one. I say once and for all it's a team sport.

There could be additional meets, which would be like the abundance of NCAA Bowl games, or the NIT in college basketball.

Just like the football BCS system, you get dozens of "Championships" in addition to conferences. That means more revenue for the schools that host these meets, more interest for programs that would otherwise not qualify for NCAAs or would finish in the bottom 15 teams.

How you determine the qualifiers, I don't know.

CircleofChub wrote:

Your 'team only' rule would simply have more schools dropping XC.

The NCAA likes big events with lots of teams - they are easier to market. This is the same org considering increasing the size of the BB tourney to 128.

To get the 'regular season' in xc to mean something you would have to have an agreement across multiple conferences and that's not going to happen.

The basic problem is that everyone and anyone can line up at the regional meet. Should be conference champs and then at large bids earned via regional/national competition.

How do you figure schools would drop XC if we said it was a team sport?

You reference the NCAA basketball tournament, as a "big event", when in fact it is 13 different events, with over 50 games. Couple that with the NIT, you have over 24 events in different cities across the country after the conference tournies.

After conferences in XC? You have 10. 9 Regionals and Nationals.

Same thing as basketball in football. After the conference championships games. there are 40 bowl games, with more proposed for the next few years.

I think the regional meets should be eliminated.

I say after the conference meets, there should be a 15-20 or so post-season races of 6-8 teams. Each will have a champion, and will get a big trophy or a banner or something. We celebrate the winner of the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl each year, even though that team is maybe the 40th best team in the country that year.

In basketball, teams will advertise to recruits that they made it to the "Round of 32" in the NCAA tournament, even though in NCAA XC the 32nd best team is a complete joke.

A system that allows mid-level teams to get some accolades is what XC needs.

Many mid-majors who are clinging to non-revenue sport do so by being able to say 'I had a guy top 10 at regs' "I had a guy qualify for nats"

Now the only measure of success will be team based allowing FB and BB centric ADs more reason to dump mens XC.

My suggestion has the reg meets serving as a qualifier and being more meaningful which is what you are after with your 'bowl' approach without blowing everything up which is not likely to happen.

Some interesting ideas on here...

I would love to see a system where the regular season and the conference meet counted toward regional qualification...and maybe only 128 teams or even as few as 64 made the regional meet.

Who would grapple these issues, the Cross Country Executive Committee? I know any changes would have to be NCAA approved, but where would one start?