Make indoors optional for west coast and southwest universities, and start a winter outdoor NCAA sport in the southwest Jan toquote]rojo wrote:I came across a blog post by Wichita State coach John Wise which I liked a great deal. I'm not sure if it's feasible (the awful programs and distance only programs wouldn't like it) but it's hard to argue with the following excerpt which I loved.It 100% drives me nuts when a team will get destroyed in a traditional dual meet but when you read the recap you'd think they won it.http://johnwisewsu.blogspot.com/2016/02/how-i-would-solve-problems-of-college.html?m=1
Wisewrote:
If you read any college website’s recap of the track and field weekend, it will generally always be very positive on how well it went. This is because in college track there are multiple definitions of what a successful track meet is. You can win the meet as a team, you can win multiple events even though you lose as a team, you can set a whole bunch of personal records and get last place and still call it a great meet. It happens all the time.
Can you imagine a football team getting beat 56-0 but the headline is “Football team excited about successful weekend†and then there is no mention of the score, just highlights of the best plays. This happens quite often in our sport so the general public has got to be confused as to what it means to have a successful meet.
Think about a basketball player scoring a career high 30 points when his team just lost by 20 points. In the post-game press conference would you ever hear the player sounding overly enthusiastic and happy about his own performance when his team was thoroughly defeated? If he did he would not make his teammates or coaches very happy.
Opponents to this would say track and field is an individual sport and that is the most important part. While I don’t disagree with that statement I would counter with the fact that our current system is set up to be individualistic and it appears to be failing. So maybe we should try something different.
Wise goes on to propose a series of mandatory scored meets - where you must cover every event - and the results of the meet determine how many people you can enter as NCAAs.
--No competitions in December (except a pre-season Intrasquad Meet)
--Jan 9 – Meet #1 – Quad scored meet (or dual/tri)
--Jan 16 – Meet #2 – Quad scored meet (or dual/tri) – NCAA scheduled meet (see below)
--Jan 23 – Meet #3 – Non-scored open meets only
--Jan 30 – Meet #4 – Quad scored meet (or dual/tri)
--Feb 6 – Meet #5 – Quad scored meet (or dual/tri) – conference opponents only
--Feb 13 – Meet #6 – Non-scored open meets only
--Feb 20 – Mandatory off weekend
--Feb 27 – Conference Championships
--Mar 5 – Mandatory off weekend
--Mar 12 – NCAA Championships
What say you?[/quote]