Saturday, January 24, 2009
Super Regional Plan: Div II/III structure
The Super-Regional Plan calls for the top 40 teams to advance to super-regionals while the remaining teams compete in a structure similar to what currently exists. The men's division will also have Div III sectionals, regionals, nationals. What are your thoughts, ideas and concerns on the structure outside of the Div I? Will enough men's and women's teams participate in the Div II structure to make it viable? Will enough men's teams participate in the Div III structure to make it viable?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
To me, this seems like a pretty empirical question. We know how many teams of each different size are in each area of the country.
ReplyDeleteOpen D2 will be fine everywhere.
Women's D2 should have enough teams for regionals, although they will not be full events after you skim off the super-regionals teams. You will probably have some 7 and 8 team regional championships and the like.
Open Div 3 will be viable and competitive in the areas currently covered by the NE, ME, GL, and Central regions. It will marginal in the AC and NW. It will be basically non-viable in the south and southwest.
I posted a comment on the Size of Postseason thread that I won't repost here, but the summary is that I think D2 is pointless, and, worse, will dilute the fledgling D3.
ReplyDeleteI'll add the following:
I would argue that there should not be an entirely separate D3 system. There are plenty of small schools that have a history of being competitive with larger programs - Las Positas, Claremont, Luther, Swarthmore, Davidson, to name a few. These programs should not be barred from a D3 Nationals if they choose to compete in the D1 structure; the D3 championship would be much poorer were that to happen.
If there is to be a separate D3 Sectionals and Regionals, I would suggest that small schools that make the D1 Super-Regionals automatically get a bid to D3 Nationals; similarly, there should be a way for small schools who are competing in D1 Sectionals to make D3 Regionals. The one problem here is that we can't have D1 Sectionals participation be open to everyone and at the same time make an auto-bid to D3 Regionals. Maybe small schools that want to be eligible for both D3 and D1 need to register as Tier 1 teams and have a reasonable record in order to be allowed to play in D1 Sectionals and get an auto-bid to D3 Regionals if they don't make D1 Super-Regionals?
I would classify ultimate teams in one of three ways.
ReplyDelete1) Good teams, currently nationals or upper level regionals teams. Usually established programs, but not necessarily big schools.
2) Bad teams that are trying to be good. Either they are new programs, small schools, lack of talent. But they play ultimate for the competition and are seeking to improve.
3) Bad teams that just want to have fun. Usually not many good players, not much interest in working hard, really prioritizes the partying.
Obviously, these are pretty broad generalizations, but what concerns me about these proposals is that there are only two tiers, one for the good teams, and one for everybody else. I worry about the teams from category 2 only having the opportunity to either spend most of a tournament getting crushed by category 1 teams or crushing category 3 teams, and having only a handful of games against similar teams that don't really have tier 1 aspirations, but want to take themselves seriously.