Monday, September 27, 2004
The Death of College Baseball
Usually when the decline of college baseball is discussed, people spit chew tobacco and complain about Title IX and the money and scholarships it "stole" from men's programs. From another end of the spectrum, the nerds fire up their computers and complain about SEC overrepresentation in the CWS (yes, I have a rant about how the west coast teams get screwed, but now is not the time). Sadly, the NCAA is getting ready to put in effect new rules that will cripple college baseball as we know it.
The main thrust is that the start date of the season is going to be moved back to March 1. Some of us, the lucky ones who live in warmer places, enjoy the first pings of the season right around the Super Bowl. However, the northern schools have decided that if other teams were going to get their home schedules rolling while there was still snow on the ground, then they were going to take their ball and go home. The northern schools (with the Big Ten being the major players here), threatened to pull out of NCAA baseball and form their own league. So the NCAA bent over backwards, and it now looks like we'll be pissing away nearly a month of college baseball in the warmer regions of the country.
Other changes in the schedule - there will be a 45 day window for fall practices, you can even play games, although those games won't count. Teams will not be allowed to practice until February 1. And they'll push back the start of the CWS another week.
The fall practice window seems kind of crazy to me, what's the point of playing games if the games won't count? The winter blackout is just another concession to the northern teams. And the delay of the CWS puts addition financial burdens on schools that end in the early summer, as the baseball programs will be forced to pay for housing and feeding their teams for another week ("student-athletes" become very expensive when not actually students).
All of this is to please northern teams. There hasn't been a strong northern team since Jim Abbott was at Michigan. Some take this as strong proof that college baseball is seriously unbalanced. On the other hand, let's look at a history of the frozen four. See any Sunbelt teams in there? How about we change the rules to make things easier for the Southern and Western schools? Seems to me that some sports by their nature are regional sports. Weakening a sport where it is strong to help it develop in an area where it may never work is a bad idea.
posted by David 8:53 PM
