Men's College Water Polo

College - Mens
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To avoid cluttering up the 2026 thread I wanted to move this to its own thread.

I think college water polo is great and fun to watch. It is the highest level of polo we have in the US. In the spirit of progress, I am curious how the product can continue to advance into the future. Not trying to dunk on the current product, but make it even better than it is.

My thought is the dream to one day have true parity. Not just parity in the non big 4. Our NCAA championship is very flawed in its current design. As @waterpolowednesdays has discussed, a 5-16 tournament would be epic and would draw as much or more attention than the current NCAA championships. From a business perspective you could likely monetize a tournament like this so it isn’t operating at a loss too.

The Big 4 already has 3 tournaments. The MPSF mid season tournament, MPSF conference tournament, and the NCAA championship tournament. Good for the big 4, but IMO thats boring and hurts the sport. Not blaming those 4 schools as not their issue. It’s a flaw in our structure.

So while solving the parity issue is not solvable unless the sport expands to more schools, such as TX as an example, can we at least create more excitement like the suggestion above?

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My understanding is that it would take significant growth in the number of D1 teams to expand the tournament beyond the current number of teams. One potential way to get more late/post-season play would be to create something like NCAA basket balls National Invitational Tournament for the highest ranked teams that do not get invites to the NCAA’s. Given all our discussion about the parity in the teams ranked from #6 or so to the mid teens, there could be another 8 team single elimination tournament. Funding the hosting of this and the team’s travel to play in it might be challenging, but if the initial 4 games were regional play-ins to a weekend final 4 at a single site, it might be doable. I’d enjoy that, but I’d be more interested in a strategy for growth in the D3 and enough teams for a D2 tournament. That would do a lot more to create playing opportunities for high school and club players who may be getting displaced from top D1 teams by transfers and internationals.