NCAA Qualifying - Conference to Super-Regional?

This sounds like a really good idea. This would fix the biggest problem with Super-Regionals, that having 4 championship races in around a month is unreasonable.

This also fixes the problem with Regionals, that it's natural for small sections of the country to have up and down years, so Regionals will go from hard to easy to get out of on a yearly basis. With super-regionals it is possible to nearly eliminate this uncertainty, because if (for example) the mid-atlantic gets weak one year but the south-east gets strong, they will cancel themselves out and qualifying out of the "East" regional will generally be the same year in and year out.

I think that's a great idea. It get's my vote (that is if I had one).

one potential problem with this is that some teams are in a conference that isn't geographically in their region. An example is Notre Dame. The Big East according to your would get six teams into the east. But Notre Dame would be located in the midwest super-regional. I'm sure it could be fixed easily, but just something I saw. Also you wouldn't be having 4 championship races in a month. The regional would be the same weekend as pre-nats traditionally is or 4 weeks before super-regional would take place. Conference meets would generally be in the middle. So you would still have 2 weeks before each race (9 days for nationals).

I really like the conference idea. Split the regions up by conference. I think you take 30 teams from placing at conference, but you always need some at-large options. What if 3 teams from the Mid-Con are good enough to be top 10(I know it's a stretch but in XC you never know)? A big problem that occurs is that some regions are still going to be stronger than others and some deserving people are staying home. I'm still in favor of the current system but abolish pre-nats and limit the number of entries to meets to something like 30.

Super regional is posing problems for the South Central and West regions with the possibility of racing at altitude in the Mountain region. Also, travel is quite extensive for a region that covers Texas and Arkansas to the east, the Pacific Coast, Mexico, and Canada as its borders. A team in this super regional could put in a five hour, two connection flight for the super regional and turn around fly across the country for the NCAA championship. The rest of the schools would probably travel half the distance for two races that Arkansas or Colorado would travel just to their super regional.