Texas A&M coach RIPS NCAA regional system.

I suggest that anyone who still thinks this absurd track meet is a good idea should have two choices. The first is give them the opportunity to commit themselves into the looney bin for the day, or take the option of buying a ticket for the meet (no one else will) and strapping themselves to a seat forced to watch 11 hours of Javelin competition.

The University of Texas took a financial bath on this meet with about 1,000 tickets sold each day (and half that many actually attending to buy their hot dogs). If anyone still thinks this is a good idea, they are not awake.

I always enjoy talking to coach Henry at meets when I can, he's very open about what he thinks, and if you've ever been to an A&M indoor meet, you know how much he cares about making the fans a part of the meets.

I think these top NCAA coaches can teach us more than just how their athletes are doing. They're the ones that have to make the system work for them, and they know exactly the parts that they'd like to see change.

jsquire wrote:

UO and TAMU's athletes have to think of the meet as something to be endured rather than the first step to a championship. (This is the ONLY time you'll see me second-guess either of their coaching decisions, but I think this is a major mis-step on their parts.)

Really? UO and A&M pretty much qualified everyone they wanted, at will this weekend (with stout marks, btw). If Florida wins in Eugene, it's because they're absolutely loaded with a sprint crew rivaling anything LSU, Tennessee, or TCU threw out there in the early part of the 2000's.

Like Pat Henry wouldn't figure out how to win with any system. He will. But that wasn't his point.

We need to atract TV fans, and this didn't do it at all.

How about this one?

Every conference champ goes to one of 6 regionals plus the next 14 (whatever makes 8 per event - maybe 10 for distances. Which would be 48 and 60) fastest times. I am assuming there are 34 D1 conferences, which is a guess based on the auto qualifiers in NCAA Basketball.

Then the winner of each regional plus the next 2 fatsest times makes nationals (or the next 6 fastest for non-lane events). Each sprint event would have only 8 qualifiers at nationals and the distance and field events have only 12 qualifiers.

Nationals would be straight finals only, and be over within 3 hours. The Multis could be competed the 2 days before.

Wiat, wait, wait, wait!! This would actually mean that we would have an incredibly compling track meet on American soil!!! That's never going to happen. Let's just keep on making the sport as boring as possible!

I actually really like this and think if you combined it with a team playoff system it would work really well and for sure get fans excited. The main problem I see with it though is that unlike team sports you can have multiple participants from a school and that could make it insanely challenging to get out of some conference meets. Otherwise I love it.

For the team meets you could have 9 teams make the tournament with 3 tri meets and have the 3 winners advance to another tri meet to crown the national champion. Each team gets up to 3 runners in each event and you score top 5 at 7,5,3,2,1 or similar. Just have to make sure its hosted on a nine lane track.

I agree. There's no magic to dual meets, but how about a tweak?

16 seems to be the magic number in the NCAA, so instead of tri meets, let's have quad meets. Each team would have 2 entries, so it could be run on 8-lane tracks. Limiting teams to 2 entries per event might also encourage a more even spread of talent with some athletes rejecting a top program because it's too strong in their event (the "no playing time" argument).

Your idea would be good if travel and hotels were free for fans, coaches, and athletes, if fans didn't have to work, and if athletes at quarter system schools didn't have to study for June finals.

Basically, Regionals should be dumped, the two day Conference Champs should be the sole meet where entries are decided. The top N winners per conference, plus those who achieve an NCAA wide standard (at the Conference Champ meet) should advance to the NCAA finals.

"bad for pat henry" really??? he will WIN with any system that these dipshits come up with...(roughly 29 national championships I believe, at different schools with both genders involved) As for all the posters that have no freaking idea whats going on because you have never figured out how to win as an athlete or coach (whatever you may be) I think coach Henry has forgotten more about track and field thank you will even know.... just my neutal obsevation, you freaking hemorrhoids of track!!

what i don't understand about all the complaints that the meet takes too long, is how you can expect a nice tightly buddled meet when...

unlike other sports T&F meets compete with both genders. when is the last time you went to a college basketball game and watched one half of the mens game, then a half of the womens game before bringing the men back out and finishing again with the women. though its a dumb analogy the point is that there are essentially two huge meets going on at these events. a mens meet and a womens meet. of course it is going to be a long affair.

also, lets look at other college sports. football uses the BCS, which is essentially like a rank-order list in that teams with top records from season get automatically placed into the national championships. almost everyone HATES that system! but because it is impossible to play a lot of football games they are stuck.

college basketball accepts a wide field into the ncaas. the tournament takes forever! almost a month to complete. and that is never a problem. people love it. what they love is the head to head competition where lesser-known quality teams get the chance at beating the assumed better programs.

isnt sport all about this head to head competition..."that's why you play the game"

its not about head to head competition so much as the expense to these programs that have to house and feed and travel these athletes. What do you think Nebraska had to spend to go to regionals. Probably more money than the NCAA allows for track scholarships. That makes a lot of sense - right? Basketball is during the semester and they only have to travel 10 athletes.

I gotta say that after listening to his incessant whining (I'd prefer 11 hours of javelin to it, by the way), I think that Pat Henry is BAD for track and field.

He wants his kids to be pampered. He doesn't want them to compete. He wants a red carpet and he wants to crap on smaller schools.

If track and field has a problem, guys like this are it.

May Texas A&M take a huge dump in Eugene.

"Soooo if a school has a very weak team overall, and they recruit/land a superstar athlete that wants to stay close to home, under your system, he or she would never see the national meet? That's cool, just so I understand you. I mean, who cares if talent is left sitting at home through no fault of their own. I don't say this often on here, but, for you here goes, IDIOT!"

The Heisman Trophy winner doesn't get to play in the national championship. Exactly, who cares if talent is left sitting at home. They can compete in the USA National Championships and that will be a better meet for it.

This past weekend was horribly boring. It sucked.

Try telling the over 300 athletes who never would have made nationals without the regional meet that the event was boring or that it would have been more exciting or fairer to not have had the meet but allowed the descending order to automatically set the fields for championships.

One issue that hasn't been touched here is the fact that any system that attempts to get the best individuals into a national championship (whether through head-to-head competition or descending order lists) will result in a skewed and unsatisfying team championship meet.

Maybe the top 3 or 4 spots go to the best teams (though not always), but after that, it's always a crap shoot. Any school with three high scorers can be a top-10 team, even if they got 11th in their conference. It's a ridiculous way to determine the best "teams".

For the same cost as the bloated regional/national system, you could in fact have a team and individual championship on seperate weekends. A two-day, 10-12 team meet with the major conference champion teams + x number of at-large teams would be one hell of an exciting meet. You'd also have meaningful team competition, not 5 stars and a relay trying to win a 21 event team meet. The missing talent wouldn't matter, because it would be focused all on the team championship.

Follow that up with a two- or three-day, scaled-down individual championship meet from descending order lists (no team scoring) and you have another hell of an exciting meet.

Yes, you'd lose the head-to-head aspect of regionals that a lot of people like (and a lot of people don't like), but you'd free up money and time for a real team championship that T&F has never had.

Only if the Javelin took 2 or 3 hours total then 10,000 people would have came to watch.

I think most people are forgetting that the amount of fans that would attend these events would not change a statistical significant amount with any increase or decrease in time. People like storylines (ie Favre playing the Packers again, Bolt running at Penn, ect). The storyline for this meet is qualifying for next rounds in Eugune. If a top team in NCAA doesn't bring it on a certain and loses, its called an upset. There is no Sweet 16 champion, there are just teams in the Elite 8.

Then make it happen at the conf champs my taking the top 3. Regionals are boring.

My team competes in a relatively weak conference. It would boost my athletes chances of going to nationals by a factor of at least ten to adopt your model of top 3 going to nationals. However, I would not want to see that model adopted because it would be grossly unfair to those athletes and teams in stronger conferences.

To me, fairness is an integral part of the sport. I don't want a system that is unfair to anybody - my team or any other team.

The problem I see is that we are victims of our own success. By that I mean that the numbers of quality athletes have grown so large nation wide that the burden of creating a fair qualifying system has been increased by the sheer volume of excellence. This is something to be celebrated, but it still produces some problems, with qualification to nationals being one of them.

As we wrestle with these and other problems, we need to keep in mind fairness, equal opportunity, and the spirit of competition. That should be the essence of college sports.

Jeeze, did you see again that Regionals are a failure and are on the way out. Conference champs have always been a huge success. So start making noise to bulk up the conference champs because that's all we will have before NCAAs next year.

You're welcome to your opinion.

Conference meets are fine, but I think that there are over 30 conferences nationwide so if you take 3 per event, you'll have fields over 90 per event.