By Staff
Coaching Management, 8.6, September 2000, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0806/bbformat.htm
It’s safe to say that the 64-team NCAA Division I baseball championship has been a big hit. But even the members of the committee that oversaw the expansion and devised the regional to super regional to College World Series progression have been surprised by the extent of its success.
“Even in our wildest dreams, we didn’t realize how good it was going to be,” says LeMoyne College Athletic Director Dick Rockwell, who just completed a two-year stint as Chair of the Division I Baseball Committee. “This year’s College World Series was sold out most of the time, you had a tough time getting a ticket for the final game, and the final score was 7-6. And the super-regional concept has really taken hold.”
Things turned around enough from 1998 (the last year of the 48-team playoffs) to 1999 (the first year with 64 teams) that the championship went from losing almost $250,000 to making more than $400,000—a turnaround of nearly two-thirds of a million dollars. The super-regional concept has been one of the big reasons for the difference, with eight sites hosting best-two-out-of-three series to determine the eight teams that advance to Omaha for the College World Series. Previously, eight regional tournament winners advanced to Omaha. There are now 16 four-team regionals with regional winners advancing to the super regionals.
“Most baseball people feel baseball is meant to be played as a series, so the two-out-of-three regional concept seems to please coaches,” Rockwell says. “And now fans can follow their team. If a team is selected to a regional, they know where that team would go for a super regional if they win, and the fans have a pretty good idea who they might play.”
The tournament expansion has also allowed the championship to spread to areas previously left out of the tournament action. Regionals have been held in such locations as South Bend, Ind.; Upper Montclair, N.J.; Minneapolis, Minn; and Columbus, Ohio, which also hosted a super regional.
The committee members have tweaked some aspects of the original plan. They’ve arranged the brackets so that a top-seeded team won’t face a conference foe in the super regionals and have helped develop a new selection system for the umpiring crews.
“I think the biggest concern is we would like to have it like basketball, where if an umpire does a good job at the regional, he gets sent to a super regional or to Omaha,” Rockwell says. “But one has to understand that if an umpire is going to work Omaha, that takes two weeks of vacation. They really have to be assigned earlier. The new agreement is to assign them around November, which gives the umpire time to get together with his employer.”
As Rockwell leaves the committee and Wally Groff of Texas A&M takes over as Chair, Rockwell sees a couple of major issues on the horizon—transfer rules and amateurism rules. “There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on the amateurism proposals, and I think they will be sent back for more investigation,” Rockwell says. “And there are some coaches around the country who would like to see a new transfer rule. Currently, in sports other than football and basketball, a player can transfer and then play the next year. Some people feel baseball should get in line with football and basketball [and require a student-athlete to sit out a year after transferring].”
Rockwell is confident the right solutions will be found for whatever issues the committee faces. “In the five years I spent on the committee, the most rewarding thing was to see 10 people, from diverse backgrounds and with diverse interests, all come to one common denominator, which was the best interest of college baseball,” Rockwell says. “There’s a camaraderie on the committee that I’ve never experienced before. Everyone in the room had the same question, ‘How are we going to make this better for college baseball?’ And if you’re a baseball person, that really makes you feel good.”
(For more information on the NCAA amateurism proposals, go to our Web site at and type “Amateurism” in the search window.)