College swimming is now giving auto qualifiers for mid-major conference winners. Should track and field follow suit?

Descending order list is best if you're the coach at BU!

give auto qualitiers for the top 3 or 4 in cross country for sure, and have a qualifying race for the other 3 or 4 spots.

everybody will want to go to the worlds that way, and not mess up their prep for summer track, only have to point a mini peak for worlds.

Grant Fisher said as much in an interview, either independently or he reads these boards.

I'm seeing a number of themes here quored by elites in interviews.

These statements are not made in a vacuum. There can be traction.

Years ago there was a Canadian cross country admin decision fiasco, and the press on blogs and track and field, may well have imparted change.

also, with the DQ, minor infractions to moderate fractions, set the criminal runner back a place instead of executing. no other sport does this, in boxing if you head butt a guy three times you lose a point.

only in track if you step on a line, do you get sent to the gallows, with murder 1.

after all the rules of track were made in 1897, by a bunch of aristocrats, snorting snuff, sending troops to the Boor War and what not.

How quickly we forget! Conference champions received spots at regionals automatically when the NCAA first rolled out the regional meets back in 2003. (I think that it was '03).

Most schools brought their conference champs for "the championship experience" or to say that they had someone "compete at the NCAAs". Not all mid-major schools brought their conference champions though for several reasons...

1) If they were not competitive at the NCAA level;

2) If the school couldn't afford/wouldn't pay for the extra time on campus after the semester ended but before Regionals.

Indoor season is too short to throw in a regional. I think there should be 8 or so regionals outdoors instead of 2 first round sites. This means some athletes will have an easier time than others and some athletes will have shorter trips to their regional than conference meet - like ACC schools in California. Oh well.

There are a lot of people on here that say that "winning" is more important than times.

So according to them you'd think these guys should be included because they "winners"...

Are they taking someone's spot? If not then fine. I mean we put mid majors in the college football playoff. I think the thinking there is kind of an offspring of the craziest tournament in the world--March Madness, which taught us that its interesting to have these cindarellas in there. As well, why have conferences unless winning your conference has meaning. I guess that's the thought. There should be a reward for winning your conference if it doesn't harm more qualified folks.

The people that say that are usually referring to XC. XC is a sport in which people get too focused on times. It really is meaningless to compare XC times from one course to another course and even if on the same course and different races unless the times are quite disparate.

Swimming is a bit different than T&F in that there seems to be a much bigger gap in the performance levels of those at mid-major vs the big swimming schools. That said, if the time is met that was pre-determined, why not let them qualify?

As someone else said they used to give conference champs a spot at the regional system that ended in 09. We rolled out the two region “first round of nationals” in 2010.

I think it is an effort to have more of a March Madness feel but the gap in the ncaa is growing FAST. You are losing the mid major level in all sports. Bring on the super league of 2032.

I think the OSU swimming coach is complaining that mid-major champions don't have to meet time standards.

Running in a race with others around you helps you run faster, so someone who wins a noncompetitive conference title race might actually be "faster" (or capable of running faster) than someone who finishes a few seconds faster in a competitive race. That's an argument for automatically including mid-major champions in track nationals regardless of times.

Is the same true for swimming to the same extent, though? Can swimmers even tell how their competitors are doing, or are they just looking straight ahead? And it's not like the "track" for swimmers is all that different from one pool to the next, though I've read about studies looking at which lanes get more turbulence, so maybe there are differences between pools of different depths or something.

Former high school and division 3 runner here, who at one point had the goal of being a collegiate cross country and track coach but somehow ended up making my living as an age group swimming coach so I have I’ll chime in.

I'll definitely concede that here are some similarities between the sports, such as a 400lcm/500scy being similar to the mile and the 100's are comprable to the 400's in track. Also there's plenty of training similarities that carry over but that’s about where the similarities start to end.

They are essentially two different sports fundamentally in how their athletes are
developed and how the competitions are structured. Several of the clubs I have worked for had 300 swimmers on the program in the team, anywhere from ages 8 to 18 and these swimmers swim year-round. (we were small compared to the 1000+ swimmer clubs). While they do compete in high school sometimes, depending on the state typically the better kids will just go to their high school school meets on Thursdays and go to their sectional and state meets but only practice with their club teams. And when I talk about practicing, it’s important to understand that a lot of of these teams the top kids are training 18 hours a week. Roughly 15 in the water and another 3 hours of dryland training outside of the water, so the level of development they get really eclipses the level of development for most runners. I only say all this because I think you have to understand the sport a little to understand what they’re saying and what they’re trying to do in terms of the mid majors.

I personally am against this concept, I see it more as a reaction to the smaller schools trying
to get a competitive edge on some of the larger schools. Take Texas for example, the head coach of Texas is Bob Bowman (that’s Michael Phelps‘s coach for those you don’t know) they are essentially the Yankees of the collegiate swimming ranks. They have huge booster dollars and with so they can get the fastest and the best talent in and if if they don’t go there, then they’re gonna go to some other place like Georgia or California. So these mid majors can’t afford to compete with these programs financially because all the changes in the NCAA recruiting and NIL and paying athletes it’s hard for these mid majors that don’t have the funding and don’t have the financial resources and backing of boosters to compete in that regard and that that’s why I think this rule really came from.

Also, It’s not a Cinderella story. It’s worse than that. It’s allowing people to compete in the meat that shouldn’t be there. If you go look last year‘s NCAA men’s results for the 500 freestyle for example (in each event they take anywhere from 50 to 60 athletes) there were maybe 5 swimmers entered NOT from a power conference. So that means out of 47 people that qualified for the meet and swam only 3-5 were not from a power conference. With this policy you'll have people at the meet, taking a spot from faster athletes just because they won a slow conference. The likelyhood of an althete 15s slower than the top 16 swimmers scoring is slim to impossible.

I've tried doing some reading (i.e. searching on SwimSwam) to get more context about the changes. If they really changed the procedure mid-season, that's crazy.

As someone who doesn't follow college swimming, I don't see the big deal. I'm assuming the last few qualifiers aren't going to win whether they're P4 swimmers getting in via times, or mid-major swimmers who had to win a conference championship. (And if there's no B finals, I'm guessing 8 people score, just like in track, but I could be wrong about that.) College sports have already become so tilted toward the P4 schools that I can't be that upset when the mid-majors band together. (Of course, in a few more years the P4 schools might be the only ones left with swimming programs.)

I know in HS in my state, all the swimming state qualifiers (and indoor track, for that matter) are based strictly on time. But in outdoor track, it's all about placing high enough at district and then regionals in order to get to state. I personally find that much more compelling as a fan.

I think it'd be great to have some of the outdoor NCAA regionals qualifiers be based on conference championship results. Like rojo says, "We need more meets that matter." I'm never going to watch 20 heats of the 5K at BU with dudes chasing times, but I might watch SECs or Big Tens.

Ex-collegiate swimmer at P4 school.

I’ll keep it brief to not get too mired in the weeds here.

Basically it means that at big schools like Texas or Cal, your 6th, 7th, 8th best swimmer in an event may get bumped because of the limit. They weren’t scoring anyway. Conference champions still need to hit a QS to get auto bid, so it’s not like bottom rung swimmers are making it to NCAAs.

Some people have compared it to the Olympics. I don’t like the analogy. For example, the US may have 5 of the fastest 8 swimmers in an event, but only 2 get to go to the Olympics. But in a case like that all 5 would go to NCAAs.

I think the worse decision was on diving and no B consols.

what this is about is definitions of "merit." is merit a "time" or is it "winning a race" and particularly like winning conference. i also did soccer. soccer treats winning conference as pure merit and then gives out at large after that -- like march madness. your rank might affect how you get seeded, placed in a regional, or if you get to host.

in XC we do it by regionals which is a deliberate attempt to reward merit while also keeping some spread and diversity in the nationals participants.

there is a limited effort that direction with the east and west regionals in TF. we can't do 30 or 40 auto qualifiers on winning conferences, there's too many for too few regionals spots as currently structured. there'd be too little room for at large and not enough time merit.

however, you could chop the regions down to XC size -- the same ones -- and take fewer from each region.

i am fine with either. time makes sense particularly on a standard course. but for a sport that rewards "winning" in XC, it could be seen as odd that is less true in TF. you go to worlds or the olympics and it's not just straight time qualifying, it's this many Qs and that many qs.

i do think you need some diversity to who is able to progress to maintain buy-in in a unified track division. like you have people struggling to compute that indiana football could win it all, because it's not their "role." it's just supposed to be bama, clemson, ohio state, every year, which bores me to tears and probably eventually fosters structural rebellion. why should i keep playing in a rigged system. why don't you go off and do your own thing.

but to be real i think TF spreads out the rewards enough this isn't a big problem there. a plucky school can win a race, pick up some medals, earn some qualifiers.

but if the competitive balance got skewed and UH or USC had 10 of the 100m guys or something, people would complain, and they might carve up the regions and give fewer runners out of a region, which implicitly would stop them getting 10 guys of the 48, and several through to the final.

i also think you have to watch out with NIL booming plus this hinchcliffe "boomerang pro" thing starting to happen. if you started to have a situation where particular school(s) dominated on how much they could hook you up with, or their ability to bring back athletes who went pro, you might want to limit the ability of single schools to pile kids into nationals on time.

one of the virtues of college XC and TF is it's not splintered bowl and playoff divisions. and i kind of like football is finally getting where we decide how good UCF or idaho is on the field and not the rankings, bowl picks, or whether they fit some tiny semifinal setup.

i think those schools striving just as hard in the same division is healthy for the sport's longevity and not having conferences or teams drop the sport to save a buck.