Watching yesterday’s college football playoff games with Tulane and JMU reminds me a lot about the WP NCAA structure. Football is allowing the group of 5 teams in to avoid lawsuits. It made for less competitive games and less enjoyable watch for everyone but fans of JMU and Tulane.
@waterpolowednesdays did a good episode on a potential modification to the NCAA tournament that I thought was insightful and a way to make it competitive while makign the regular season more important. What I am more curious about is why D2 is given a spot in the tournament when more times than not they would struggle to make the top 20. I would think you could combine D2 with the top D3 teams to create a separate championship, which would be extremely competitive and fun to watch. I am sure the D2 team that makes the tournament enjoys the build up to the game, but would it be better to have an opportunity to play for a championship in a competitive environment?
What is the group of 5 in football and why is there a risk of being sued if they aren’t let into the cfp?
In regards to water polo, I don’t know enough about the structure of the divisions. Why is there a d2 and a d3? If d2 is just going to be included in d3 anyways, why not combine the two from the get go? Why doesn’t d2 have there own championship?
A D2/D3 tournament would be pretty fun — this year CMS beat Concordia 18-12 and Concordia beat Pomona-Pitzer 14-12 so I think the seedings would have gone something like this for an 8 team tourney:
CMS, Concordia, PP, Biola, MIT, Gannon/Augustana/Salem in some order (they all kinda beat each other)
The other option would be to have a D2 NCAA championship tournament sponsored by USAWP and have it at the same location as D3. While all the D2 teams mostly play in the WWPA and you’d need to make changes to that tournament it would be cool to have all these teams at the same location playing for championships.
A tournament with those 8 teams you mentioned would be a fun one to watch, and the players would enjoy it too. I think it would elevate the current D3 tournament and provide a better post season for the D2 teams as well.
Group of 5 are the football conferences outside of Big Ten, ACC, SEC, and Big 12. That is why we have James Madison and Tulane in the playoffs and creating non competitive games. You could have Notre Dame and Texas in instead. There was a story yesterday explaining the lawsuit challenges if they couldn’t get in for anti trust reasons.
The NCAA divisional structure has little to do with strength of individual sport programs. It has to do with size of school in enrollment, financial situation including scholarships, athletic facilities, and regional considerations. In order for schools to transition from one division to the next, all of those categories have to be top-notch.
When it comes to national championships within a division, the NCAA looks at total participants within said division. If there is not enough schools, they do not host a nationals. D3 water polo is sponsored by usawp because the NCAA has found there are not enough D3 schools. They ruled the same for D2 but there are even less D2 schools to make a nationals work.
The reason D2 schools Salem, Biola and Concordia made the D1 NCAA championships is because they won their conference, which is considered a D1 conference.