NCAA Baseball Tourney Needs A Change

By: Pete Yanity News Channel 7 Sports | News Channel 7
Published: June 10, 2009 | 0 Comments | Post a Comment

As college baseball has its field set for the World Series in Omaha I wonder if the NCAA is taking a look at how it does its tournament in these times of a down economy.

A decade ago they shifted from eight, six-team regionals to 16, four-team regionals with eight super regionals as they expanded the field to 64 teams.

While the latter system has provided some compelling moments under the expanded field it creates an added layer of travel, cross country travel in several cases.

Virginia and Georgia Southern are two examples of schools that had to go a long way for a regional as they were shipped to Irvine, California for their opening regional. The Cavaliers pulled the mild surprise by advancing and had a more moderate journey to Oxford, Mississippi only to have to head out to Omaha this week.

Clemson was home for the opening round of its regional but then had to head to Tempe, Arizona for its Super Regional.

As baseball teams produce varying degrees of revenue for some programs having to travel long distances may not be overwhelming to some. However, it's cash that schools would probably rather put elsewhere.

A more sensible alternative would be to go to eight, eight team regionals that are formatted like your basic conference tournament. You could the winners play a best-of three series to determine who gets a slot in Omaha (just as the CWS has to determine its champ).

In order to ensure you'll have a decent turnout for what would be nearly a week-long process you could keep teams relatively close to home so that their fans would have easy access. Virginia or Georgia Southern , or an Oklahoma State squad that had to come to Clemson for a regional, would likely bring more fans if they were only a three to five hour drive from their campuses.

If nothing else the money saved in travel would be noticeable and you could easily get the season done about a week earlier, too. As we all know, an organization that frets over Division I-A (FBS) football players missing class time in December would certainly welcome the opporunity for these athletes to be wrapped in plenty of time to focus on their second session of summer school.