As a facility director who is set to have our first college meet on Dec 3, this rule has both good and bad points. The good is that seeding is now pretty much cut and dry. When speculative marks are used and you have over 1000 entries for a meet, with 25-40% of them being speculative, it's hard to go through and verify every mark and then re-seed and move kids around. It's easy to be lazy as a meet director to just accept those speculative marks "as is."
I did a test download of the marks for our Dec 3 college meet and the speculative marks download into MeetPro2 (and I'm assuming Hy-Tek would be the same) as a note. But it is nice that with this rule in place, I can just put all of the NM/NT athletes at the end and not have to listen to a coach sing some sob story about why he used a speculative mark faster than the kids PR and how the kid is "ready to have a breakout meet." Now, I can just say prove it!
I do agree with some posters, though, that the rule is a little too strict. I think they should be given a rolling 12 month window to use for their marks. I don't think that starting on the fourth Sunday in January during indoor that all of a sudden you shouldn't be able to use last year's marks. Let it be a rolling 12 month period since some schools don't start classes until the end of January and may not have had a chance to compete. Also, with distance runners, if you have a kid who can run mile, 3k, 5k and DMR, will they really have a chance to run all four prior to that cutoff date in the same season? I've already had coaches email or call me about meets in early February that we are hosting because he has mapped out their season and can't figure out a way to get his guys to get marks in all of their individual events AND a DMR before the cut-off switches.
We plan to use the "workaround" to have invitational heats for some of our bigger/faster events. I figure meets like the Husky Classic or the Iowa State Classic will also employ this method for their fastest sections of the 3k/5k at their facilities.
What is going to be really interesting about the rule is to see the make-up of some of the NM heats at the end. When you put in a bunch of NM kids in the same section of the 3k, for instance, you could have some serious lapping issues if you have 2-3 kids who are realistically 8:30 types and a bunch who are more like 9:30 to 10 minutes. Could be a lap counting nightmare!
If the rule stays in place the way it currently reads, I wonder if we will see more teams competing in early season meets to get at least 1 mark before they compete later in the season?