Welcome to the UPA's College Restructuring Blog. This blog is intended for UPA members to provide feedback to the UPA on the two proposed structures for the future of UPA intercollegiate Ultimate.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Super-Regional Plan: Open Forum
What are your thoughts, ideas and concerns about the Super-Regional plan? Here you can post about any element of the Super-Regional Plan but please be sure to follow the ground rules listed on the left hand navigation bar.
Of the two, I greatly prefer the Super-Regional plan, but that may be because I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around the exact order of events in the Conference proposal. I do have a few thoughts however.
1. As mentioned in other threads, the selection process seems iffy. Sometimes things will be pretty clear, but down at the difference between the 24th and 25th best teams we're unlikely to have a ton to go on. For the love of god, let's not have even more of our decisions based on RSD hype.
2. Having only Sectional CHAMPIONS move on seems iffy. I can't imagine a section that wouldn't include both Tufts and Harvard, for example (or the NC teams, for another), but both of those teams have consistently been at the top of their region. It is very easy to imagine a year in which both would be stronger than champions coming out other Northeastern sections. But one team's (Division 1) season ends at Sectionals?
3. If the very successful Cultimate tournaments (and others) become part of a UPA regular season, who has say on what teams are accepted? Will every team have equal access to the Tier 1 games they want? How is that feasible?
4. In general, it seems like we're moving away from caring about winning tournaments. Maybe that's right, but even this year cultimate tournaments have largely done away with traditional brackets, focusing on large number of high-quality, non-repetitive games. With 4 bids from each super-region to nationals, it's conceivable that teams might roll over in the finals to be more rested for the next game even more than they do now. Or would all of the teams in Semis just make it? I can't imagine anything less exciting for our sport.
Well, that's a lot of rambling. Speaking just for myself here.
"I greatly prefer the Super-Regional plan, but that may be because I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around the exact order of events in the Conference proposal"
I suggest looking at the "flow chart" and "sample seasons" links in the conference proposal:
I think the fact that teams can have two paths to SuperRegionals (either selection or winning sectionals) will likely be able to accommodate for the fact that multiple good teams are in a single section. For instance, Cal, Stanford, and UCSC are all in the same section, but likely one or two could get picked by the selection committee. With 24 picks, good sections would have at least one team advance straight to Super Regionals.
Things could be tough in a section that is not good enough to have a team get selected to skip Sectionals, but has two or more roughly equivalent teams fighting for one spot. I guess having other post-season play options for teams that don't qualify for Super Regionals makes this okay. It also makes that finals game at Sectionals worth something.
I agree that the format (paging Adam Tarr...) of Super Regionals will be crucial for determining how exciting the tournament is. Especially if having those 4 SR tournaments be true showcase events is a goal of the structure.
I really like the Supper Regional format. I like that it somewhat resembles the current format while expanding the amount of postseason competition available to small schools.
I don't think there is enough density of colleges on the west coast to support the conference format. Also, with the impending slashing of club sports budgets, the increased travel of the conference format seems less and less feasible.
So, when drafting this plan my vision was originally 4 10 team super-regionals. The format for this event would be 2 pools of 5 that play a round-robin on the first day. Second day would be ONLY cross-over quarters (A1 v B4, A2 v B3, A3 v B2, A4 v B1) - no semis or finals. These games could be played in a stadium back to back to back to back, creating an incredibly exciting spectator event where every game is the difference between going to the Championships or the end of the season (or at least having to wait for the algorithm to determine who else goes). With only one game going on at a time the UPA can invest the resources to make it friendly to both in person and remote spectators (concessions, live score updates, streaming video?, stats, qualified observers) like the finals of our College nationals have been for the past several years. This would have the feel of the NCAA round of 32 where teams are fighting to get in to the sweet 16 and seasons hang on one game and upsets actually matter. Far from being unexciting I can't imagine anything more exciting - I'd want to attend and bring my family and the kids that I coach if it were anywhere within reasonable driving distance (and with four of them that should be pretty easy).
Now, in the discussions the event was expanded to 12 teams per super-region and since nationals was expanded to 20 (or more) teams there were additional strength bids allocated using the algorithm.
What I would prefer to see with Nationals at 20 teams is five 10-team super-regions each qualifying four teams to Nationals. The UPA figures out how many sectionals need to be held and the winner of each sectionals qualifies automatically for super-regionals. AFTER sectionals, the remaining teams are chosen to super-regionals by selection committee based on their performance during the "UPA Rostered" season (this would be analogous to NCAA basketball conference championships qualifying some teams for the NCAA tourney with the rest of the teams chosen by selection committee).
If we wanted to expand Nationals to 24 teams instead we could have 6 super regionals.
Simply put, you're suggesting trading fairness for drama. It's a bad deal.
The beauty of ultimate, like any sport, is in the play itself, not the artificial goals we construct around the outcome of the game. People will be attracted to ultimate because of the product on the field, not the excitement of four straight games-to-go.
6 super-regionals is fine, sure, but now we're pushing that D2 event even farther down the ladder. With 36 teams (the eliminated Super-Regional teams) between the bottom D1 qualifier and the D2 champion, I start to question the point of the D2 championship. It's no longer an NCAA-style NIT (like it is in the conference plan) - it's just a national event with an awfully arbitrary qualification criteria.
Let me give a current example of why I don't like that Super-Regional idea. Right now, sports coverage is completely dominated by college basketball conference championship tournaments. (Relax, I'm not about to argue conferences = awesome. That's too obvious.)
The interesting thing about this is that, for the top ~30 teams in the nation, the major conference championships are almost completely irrelevant. The only difference their performance may make is what seed they get in the tournament, but that's a very minor benefit. For a team like UNC even that carrot is irrelevant, as they're going to get a #1 seed even if they lose immediately.
And yet, people watch these games and care immensely about them. Last night I tuned in for the end of regulation, and the SIX overtimes, of Syracuse-Connecticut. UConn was, at most, playing for a 1 seed in stead of a 2, and Syracuse has something like a 3-5 range that they could end up at. Frankly, that's not a lot at stake. And yet, it was arguably the most dramatic sporting event I've seen this year.
The play on the field makes the drama, not the format.
Tarr, your point about D2 is like saying that since only 16 teams make the sweet 16 in college basketball those 17-65 best teams should be in the NIT. Maybe basketball should start with 32 teams in the brackets, I mean those other 32 teams aren't going to win and they would make D2 more exciting.
And the point of the format isn't just about drama - it's creating a format that can be easily showcased because we are talking about one game being played at a time and the stake is all or nothing - not a format where after the finals take place there are additional games that are between lower quality teams to figure out who gets the 2nd, 3rd and maybe 4th bids to the next level. And during the finals there are other games going on to determine who will play in the backdoor so instead of having a sweet stadium field staffed with observers, statkeepers, concessions and fans you have an open field where only people who "get" the sport can really understand what is going on.
And what's unfair about a team beating another team to go to the next round? If an underdog is able to in one game when it matters put together the game of their life shouldn't it mean something instead of those two teams meet again later in the 3rd place game to go and the original favorite wins?
One of the saddest things about the sport is that the biggest upsets that have happened in championship events ended up having little or no impact on the course of the tournament - Pike defeating Sockeye in pool play in 2005, UNCW over Carleton in 2001, Wisconsin over Brown in 2000, Doublewide over Sockeye in 2008. Deleware over Florida in 2007. This is where sport is at its most inspiring and captivating - a team builds over the course of a season for one great shot. But our formats are so "fair" that these games end up being little more than a footnote. These are the best, most memorable games of the last 10 years and no one knows about them because the format made them not matter.
In order to argue your NIT/32 team big dance analogy, you need to conceive of the super regionals as the first stage of a 48/50/60 team tournament, and the regional championships as the first stage of a 96 team tournament. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. But it still begs the question of whether we want a national-level event, that teams have to fly to, to be drawing from teams ranked 70th in the country. And this tournament won't have any special appeal like a small school event. I think we're better off drawing higher-profile schools that are more accustomed to traveling to play similar competition.
"And what's unfair about a team beating another team to go to the next round? If an underdog is able to in one game when it matters put together the game of their life shouldn't it mean something instead of those two teams meet again later in the 3rd place game to go and the original favorite wins?"
What if Florida goes 1-3 on Saturday, beats 4-0 Georgia on Sunday 17-16, and then wins nationals? Does it make sense for Georgia to miss nationals as a result of one loss?
Well it doesn't, but then again, you're suggesting we would give Georgia a wildcard bid by some strength evaluation. But doesn't this destroy the win-or-go-home appeal that was supposedly the goal of the format? Georgia is pretty much guaranteed that bid to nationals either way, and everyone in the stadium knows it.
"One of the saddest things about the sport is that the biggest upsets that have happened in championship events ended up having little or no impact on the course of the tournament"
The same could be said for those Florida losses in the scenario I outline above. The same could be said for the Georgia loss in the scenario I outline above. You're not solving this problem.
Besides, the most memorable upset of recent years was Brown over Colorado, and it counted. Also, Pike over Sockeye had a major impact on the format, and UNCW over Carleton would have had a big impact were it not for an even awesomer upset two rounds later (UPenn over UNCW).
I completely agree with Kyle in this case. Regional tournaments with everything at stake are our most promotable events.
The college basketball conference tournaments are important in themselves -- it just happens that sometimes it's the ticket to the NCAA tournament or a better seed. If UVa ever wins an ACC Tournament that banners going up in the gym -- it's a big accomplishment in its own right.
It's like saying the semi-final of the FA Cup isn't exciting because it doesn't directly impact a team's chances to qualify for Championship League. There are other goals besides winning a National Championship.
My worry with this plan is the timeline. In upstate our season is just starting this weekend with just a small handful of practices outdoors. We can't start sooner because it is really cold and the fields wouldn't hold up. This is pretty true for any teams in New York or farther north. So if the regular season is ending in April doesn't that put the north east at a big disadvantage to say Florida and the west coast?
Travis, your point is a good one and certainly one of the biggest attributes of the Conference plan which compresses the "post-season" because of the structure of it and allows more time for the regular season.
At the same time, any structure that puts a greater weight on regular season results (which is what we've heard a lot of) is going to give an added advantage to teams that have the ability to practice earlier.
Of the two, I greatly prefer the Super-Regional plan, but that may be because I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around the exact order of events in the Conference proposal. I do have a few thoughts however.
ReplyDelete1. As mentioned in other threads, the selection process seems iffy. Sometimes things will be pretty clear, but down at the difference between the 24th and 25th best teams we're unlikely to have a ton to go on. For the love of god, let's not have even more of our decisions based on RSD hype.
2. Having only Sectional CHAMPIONS move on seems iffy. I can't imagine a section that wouldn't include both Tufts and Harvard, for example (or the NC teams, for another), but both of those teams have consistently been at the top of their region. It is very easy to imagine a year in which both would be stronger than champions coming out other Northeastern sections. But one team's (Division 1) season ends at Sectionals?
3. If the very successful Cultimate tournaments (and others) become part of a UPA regular season, who has say on what teams are accepted? Will every team have equal access to the Tier 1 games they want? How is that feasible?
4. In general, it seems like we're moving away from caring about winning tournaments. Maybe that's right, but even this year cultimate tournaments have largely done away with traditional brackets, focusing on large number of high-quality, non-repetitive games. With 4 bids from each super-region to nationals, it's conceivable that teams might roll over in the finals to be more rested for the next game even more than they do now. Or would all of the teams in Semis just make it? I can't imagine anything less exciting for our sport.
Well, that's a lot of rambling. Speaking just for myself here.
"I greatly prefer the Super-Regional plan, but that may be because I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around the exact order of events in the Conference proposal"
ReplyDeleteI suggest looking at the "flow chart" and "sample seasons" links in the conference proposal:
http://upa.org/college/2008_restructure/plan/conference#ref
lamar,
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that teams can have two paths to SuperRegionals (either selection or winning sectionals) will likely be able to accommodate for the fact that multiple good teams are in a single section. For instance, Cal, Stanford, and UCSC are all in the same section, but likely one or two could get picked by the selection committee. With 24 picks, good sections would have at least one team advance straight to Super Regionals.
Things could be tough in a section that is not good enough to have a team get selected to skip Sectionals, but has two or more roughly equivalent teams fighting for one spot. I guess having other post-season play options for teams that don't qualify for Super Regionals makes this okay. It also makes that finals game at Sectionals worth something.
I agree that the format (paging Adam Tarr...) of Super Regionals will be crucial for determining how exciting the tournament is. Especially if having those 4 SR tournaments be true showcase events is a goal of the structure.
I really like the Supper Regional format. I like that it somewhat resembles the current format while expanding the amount of postseason competition available to small schools.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there is enough density of colleges on the west coast to support the conference format. Also, with the impending slashing of club sports budgets, the increased travel of the conference format seems less and less feasible.
So, when drafting this plan my vision was originally 4 10 team super-regionals. The format for this event would be 2 pools of 5 that play a round-robin on the first day. Second day would be ONLY cross-over quarters (A1 v B4, A2 v B3, A3 v B2, A4 v B1) - no semis or finals. These games could be played in a stadium back to back to back to back, creating an incredibly exciting spectator event where every game is the difference between going to the Championships or the end of the season (or at least having to wait for the algorithm to determine who else goes). With only one game going on at a time the UPA can invest the resources to make it friendly to both in person and remote spectators (concessions, live score updates, streaming video?, stats, qualified observers) like the finals of our College nationals have been for the past several years. This would have the feel of the NCAA round of 32 where teams are fighting to get in to the sweet 16 and seasons hang on one game and upsets actually matter. Far from being unexciting I can't imagine anything more exciting - I'd want to attend and bring my family and the kids that I coach if it were anywhere within reasonable driving distance (and with four of them that should be pretty easy).
ReplyDeleteNow, in the discussions the event was expanded to 12 teams per super-region and since nationals was expanded to 20 (or more) teams there were additional strength bids allocated using the algorithm.
What I would prefer to see with Nationals at 20 teams is five 10-team super-regions each qualifying four teams to Nationals. The UPA figures out how many sectionals need to be held and the winner of each sectionals qualifies automatically for super-regionals. AFTER sectionals, the remaining teams are chosen to super-regionals by selection committee based on their performance during the "UPA Rostered" season (this would be analogous to NCAA basketball conference championships qualifying some teams for the NCAA tourney with the rest of the teams chosen by selection committee).
If we wanted to expand Nationals to 24 teams instead we could have 6 super regionals.
Kyle,
ReplyDeleteSimply put, you're suggesting trading fairness for drama. It's a bad deal.
The beauty of ultimate, like any sport, is in the play itself, not the artificial goals we construct around the outcome of the game. People will be attracted to ultimate because of the product on the field, not the excitement of four straight games-to-go.
6 super-regionals is fine, sure, but now we're pushing that D2 event even farther down the ladder. With 36 teams (the eliminated Super-Regional teams) between the bottom D1 qualifier and the D2 champion, I start to question the point of the D2 championship. It's no longer an NCAA-style NIT (like it is in the conference plan) - it's just a national event with an awfully arbitrary qualification criteria.
Let me give a current example of why I don't like that Super-Regional idea. Right now, sports coverage is completely dominated by college basketball conference championship tournaments. (Relax, I'm not about to argue conferences = awesome. That's too obvious.)
ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing about this is that, for the top ~30 teams in the nation, the major conference championships are almost completely irrelevant. The only difference their performance may make is what seed they get in the tournament, but that's a very minor benefit. For a team like UNC even that carrot is irrelevant, as they're going to get a #1 seed even if they lose immediately.
And yet, people watch these games and care immensely about them. Last night I tuned in for the end of regulation, and the SIX overtimes, of Syracuse-Connecticut. UConn was, at most, playing for a 1 seed in stead of a 2, and Syracuse has something like a 3-5 range that they could end up at. Frankly, that's not a lot at stake. And yet, it was arguably the most dramatic sporting event I've seen this year.
The play on the field makes the drama, not the format.
Tarr, your point about D2 is like saying that since only 16 teams make the sweet 16 in college basketball those 17-65 best teams should be in the NIT. Maybe basketball should start with 32 teams in the brackets, I mean those other 32 teams aren't going to win and they would make D2 more exciting.
ReplyDeleteAnd the point of the format isn't just about drama - it's creating a format that can be easily showcased because we are talking about one game being played at a time and the stake is all or nothing - not a format where after the finals take place there are additional games that are between lower quality teams to figure out who gets the 2nd, 3rd and maybe 4th bids to the next level. And during the finals there are other games going on to determine who will play in the backdoor so instead of having a sweet stadium field staffed with observers, statkeepers, concessions and fans you have an open field where only people who "get" the sport can really understand what is going on.
And what's unfair about a team beating another team to go to the next round? If an underdog is able to in one game when it matters put together the game of their life shouldn't it mean something instead of those two teams meet again later in the 3rd place game to go and the original favorite wins?
One of the saddest things about the sport is that the biggest upsets that have happened in championship events ended up having little or no impact on the course of the tournament - Pike defeating Sockeye in pool play in 2005, UNCW over Carleton in 2001, Wisconsin over Brown in 2000, Doublewide over Sockeye in 2008. Deleware over Florida in 2007. This is where sport is at its most inspiring and captivating - a team builds over the course of a season for one great shot. But our formats are so "fair" that these games end up being little more than a footnote. These are the best, most memorable games of the last 10 years and no one knows about them because the format made them not matter.
In order to argue your NIT/32 team big dance analogy, you need to conceive of the super regionals as the first stage of a 48/50/60 team tournament, and the regional championships as the first stage of a 96 team tournament. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. But it still begs the question of whether we want a national-level event, that teams have to fly to, to be drawing from teams ranked 70th in the country. And this tournament won't have any special appeal like a small school event. I think we're better off drawing higher-profile schools that are more accustomed to traveling to play similar competition.
ReplyDelete"And what's unfair about a team beating another team to go to the next round? If an underdog is able to in one game when it matters put together the game of their life shouldn't it mean something instead of those two teams meet again later in the 3rd place game to go and the original favorite wins?"
What if Florida goes 1-3 on Saturday, beats 4-0 Georgia on Sunday 17-16, and then wins nationals? Does it make sense for Georgia to miss nationals as a result of one loss?
Well it doesn't, but then again, you're suggesting we would give Georgia a wildcard bid by some strength evaluation. But doesn't this destroy the win-or-go-home appeal that was supposedly the goal of the format? Georgia is pretty much guaranteed that bid to nationals either way, and everyone in the stadium knows it.
"One of the saddest things about the sport is that the biggest upsets that have happened in championship events ended up having little or no impact on the course of the tournament"
The same could be said for those Florida losses in the scenario I outline above. The same could be said for the Georgia loss in the scenario I outline above. You're not solving this problem.
Besides, the most memorable upset of recent years was Brown over Colorado, and it counted. Also, Pike over Sockeye had a major impact on the format, and UNCW over Carleton would have had a big impact were it not for an even awesomer upset two rounds later (UPenn over UNCW).
Tarr:
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with Kyle in this case. Regional tournaments with everything at stake are our most promotable events.
The college basketball conference tournaments are important in themselves -- it just happens that sometimes it's the ticket to the NCAA tournament or a better seed. If UVa ever wins an ACC Tournament that banners going up in the gym -- it's a big accomplishment in its own right.
It's like saying the semi-final of the FA Cup isn't exciting because it doesn't directly impact a team's chances to qualify for Championship League. There are other goals besides winning a National Championship.
My worry with this plan is the timeline. In upstate our season is just starting this weekend with just a small handful of practices outdoors. We can't start sooner because it is really cold and the fields wouldn't hold up. This is pretty true for any teams in New York or farther north. So if the regular season is ending in April doesn't that put the north east at a big disadvantage to say Florida and the west coast?
ReplyDeleteTravis, your point is a good one and certainly one of the biggest attributes of the Conference plan which compresses the "post-season" because of the structure of it and allows more time for the regular season.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, any structure that puts a greater weight on regular season results (which is what we've heard a lot of) is going to give an added advantage to teams that have the ability to practice earlier.