Posts tagged NCAA at FanHouse

No other way to put it.

For years now west coast baseball fans have been up in arms and for good reason: their teams keep getting worked over by the selection committee.

The basic process itself makes sense: automatically invite conference champions, allow top teams to host regionals, quarrel over remaining "at large" teams. It's quite similar to how the NCAA basketball tournament works.

The major problem seems to be the introduction of several biases in this process. Although it's cited as "just one measure", the RPI rating system seems to be of heavy focus. The RPI itself, according to some, is heavily flawed and works strongly against west coast teams in particular.

Another error is how teams are allocated. This year, like most years, most of the west coast teams are bunched together in a small pack of "regional" groupings, limiting the number who can potentially make it to Omaha for the College World Series. Yet the SEC and ACC get much more favorable treatment.

There are 25 schools in the Pac-10, Big West and West Coast Conference. Eleven made the tournament field. Nine are stuffed in three regionals, meaning only 33 percent of them could advance to a Super Regional.

There are 24 schools in the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference. Fifteen made the tournament. They are stretched across 11 different regionals, so 73 percent could advance to the next round.

This has been going on for years.

Cost of doing business? Is this normal?

Among Oklahoma's remedies to the Rhett Bomar/ J.D. Quinn money-for-nothing-gate situation, the school is banning employers from hiring more than five Sooner athletes at a time.

And this:

Oklahoma also informed the NCAA that it has expanded its full-time compliance staff from three to eight workers and also has two part-time staff members. As a result, the annual compliance budget has grown to $1.2 million.

Unlike Monopoly, Oklahoma's not getting out of jail for free. This action sort of raises the ante towards any kind of "get off our back" costs that will be associated with USC when/if the Reggie Bush and O.J. Mayo situations ever get resolved.

Be sure to check out the link and see their theme picture: cheeseburger guy. Among the range of topics addressed at the "NCAA Gender Equity and Issues Forum" this week was childhood obesity. How so?

[NCAA] administrators are wondering whether increased obesity rates may have an adverse effect on the quality of prospective student-athletes in years to come.

Somehow I doubt the NCAA needs to worry about this. Youth sports are seemingly endless in number and yearlong in availability. The pool of quality athletes talented enough to compete at an NCAA level is more likely determined by young people's interest in those sports than obesity factors. It's a self-selecting phenomena. Obese kids truly passionate about sports and who have talent should and will generally find a way to be fit and compete.

Plus, at least with football, bigger kids are always in demand. Healthy kids are an important issue, but the NCAA is both over-extending itself considering this topic and is making much ado about nothing as far as future pools of quality athletes. High-level athletics requires fitness, and if kids are truly passionate about competing at the NCAA level, they'll be fit. The NCAA's focus should be on directing passion and energy into these sports which leads to able bodies, not hand-wringing over the larger obesity issue.

One would think Congress would get the lesson that spending valuable time investigating trivialities like sports is a waste of the public's time. It's not like the public has fully embraced the drawn-out inquest into Barry Bonds and Rogers Clemens, Senator Arlen Specter's crusade against the Patriots, and so on.

But no. Three misguided members of Congress now seek to interfere with college football, all in the name of pandering.

Three members of Congress want the Justice Department to investigate whether the Bowl Championship Series is an illegal enterprise.

Representatives Neil Abercrombie, Democrat of Hawaii; Lynn Westmoreland, Republican of Georgia; and Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho, introduced a resolution saying the B.C.S. restricts trade because only the largest universities compete in its games. The resolution would require the Justice Department's antitrust division to investigate if the B.C.S. violates federal law.

The measure, if it passes, would put Congress on record as supporting a postseason playoff.

Hawaii? Check. Idaho? Check. Georgia? Check. No pandering going on here! Hilariously stupid quote of the month goes to Hawaii Democrat Neil Abercrombie:

"Who elected these N.C.A.A. people?" Abercrombie said at a news conference Thursday on Capitol Hill while gripping a souvenir University of Hawaii football. "Who are they to decide who competes for the championship?"

Never let facts get in the way of a good time folks! Imagine, private - not public like Congress - interests such as the NCAA determining how their own organizations are run? This is apparently scary stuff for the closet fascist the great people of Hawaii have elected. Best of all Abercrombie doesn't appear to realize that "those NCAA people" aren't deciding who competes for college football's championship, nor should they. It's in the hands of the institutions and the conferences themselves.

Exit question: What, no co-signature from any of Alabama's representatives?

For years there has been talk of USC and UCLA returning to tradition and wearing contrasting uniforms at their rivalry game. Problem is, NCAA rules prohibit this practice and require that the offending team be docked a timeout.

It's a stupid rule, but to date the schools have obliged. It doesn't help that relations grew tense in the last year or two between the programs. Enter Rick Neuheisel.

In theory, the hyper-competitive Neuheisel should further the divide between the programs, but he and USC coach Pete Carroll at least publicly seem to respect each other. So much so, in fact, that next year may be an "Nixon visits China" moment in relations between the programs.

USC and UCLA are very close to announcing a novel idea to heat up their rivalry. Both teams will wear their home colors this season at UCLA's home game Dec. 6 in the Rose Bowl.

That means USC will wear maroon. The plan is for the Trojans to be penalized a timeout when they take the field in their homies. UCLA, then, at its first opportunity will call a timeout to even things up. Pete Carroll apparently has signed off on the p.r. strategy. What a way to ramp up the Trojans-Bruins rivalry.

You know what's next? Full diplomatic relations (yeh right!). Until anything happens this is all just talk and cutesy "Americans playing ping pong in China" type ice-breakers floated before the public. Hopefully it happens.

Previously at FanHouse
It's Time to Let USC and UCLA Party Like It's 1969
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Lost in all the kerfuffle about lengthy games and how evil the BCS supposedly is, college football continues to grow.

Last year in this space we reported that college football had become America's #3 sport. Well, it's a year later and another new piece of data has grabbed our attention:

The percentage of games that were televised jumped to 79% in 2007, up from 72.4% in 2006 and 72.5% in 2005.

Not bad for a sport with 119 teams, about half of which play in smaller conferences. Obviously a market is there for most college football games, however obscure.

Here's guessing all that controversy has actually broadened the game's appeal.

Holy hoodwink, Batman! Remember me?

From the venerable Sunday Morning Quarterback:

Make no mistake: fifteen extra seconds on the play clock is a dramatic, terrible change, and will fail miserably at its attempt to maintain plays and scoring at 2007 levels. Lengthening the play clock produces less plays, and therefore less scoring ...

...a conservative estimate - the number drops to 120 plays, 60 per team, a loss of something like three full possessions every game. If it allows enough of a slow down to average 35 seconds per play, the average drops to about 51 plays per team, almost a full 30 percent decline.

That's a staggering decline in actual football in favor of standing around (and commercials, which of course will not be cut), and also in favor of taking knees: 15 more seconds of standing around between every play means 45 extra seconds per three-down series if the clock is running, extending the amount of time that can reasonably be run off by kneel-downs from a little over a minute to a full two minutes. The committee should be devising rules that encourage last-second drama, not choke it out of existence

This is bad for college football. I stand with EDSBS, The Wizard of Odds, Get the Picture and others in opposing this specific piece of legislation that takes away from the college football experience instead of adding to it.

For the more active citizens among you, please take the following message from EDSBS to heart:

Previously at FanHouse
Rule Changes Proposed for College Football

The TV executives are unhappy, oooohhhhhh

At this time, the following are but proposals passed down from the NCAA Football Rules Committee. Approval is pending further scrutiny. The proposals include mention of 'horse collar' tackles, incidental facemasks and various timing changes. Let's review these categorically: The Good, The Bad, and The Whatever.

The Good

"abolishing the 5-yard incidental face-mask penalty"

FanHouse approved. Incidental facemask grabs happen all the time and players tend to play through them. So long as there's no twisting or dangerous grabbing, let the incident go and put that flag away.

Any block below the waist when a player already is engaged with another blocker automatically is a chop block penalty.

K.I.S.S. ruled the day here. Says SEC Coordinator of Officiating Rogers Redding:

"What we've simply said is a high-low combination block is going to be illegal. It's going to be clear to everybody. The official is not going to have to worry whether the person committing the block is from an adjacent position or behind or ahead of the line of scrimmage."

A penalty would be added for so-called "horse-collar tackles."

I'm torn between good and bad here. The horse-collar tackle is a dangerous play, but it's also more prevalent in the college game as more plays are made to the outside making backside tackles something of a regular occurrence. The ruling favors offenses but I'm not sure it will actually reduce this kind of desperate tackle.

I direct your attention to this story from Oregon:

Jeff Gaulton, the nightclub's co-owner, says he routinely comps Ducks [athletes playing for the University of Oregon].

For Oregon, this could be trouble. Because to the NCAA, this is taboo.

"I had no idea," Gaulton says.

Letting athletes in free while making others pay constitutes what the NCAA calls an "extra benefit."

Gaulton admits comping any and all Duck athletes who have wanted to gain admission. The cover charge is only $10, but good luck trying to explain that to the unblinking NCAA. According to the article, any benefits under $100 can be forgiven if paid back, but what happens to Oregon if many of its athletes were regulars with dozens of visits to Taboo over the year?

That kind of payback will cost the athletes a pretty penny. It's an almost impossible to navigate situation determining exactly how many visits each of its hundreds of athletes possibly made to that night club. Now USC's also getting roped in, as Gaulton says O.J. Mayo and several USC basketball players also came in gratis.

Have fun with all of that, Oregon and USC. In the meantime, it's a stupid rule. It discourages booster funny business, but if the NCAA wants to get serious about smaller perks it should expand its enforcement wing instead of placing heavy burdens on institutions to monitor these difficult to catch (until it's too late) situations.

(Belated H/T to DuckSportsNews)
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Sort of. Not really. Maybe. Read on.

The freshly hired UCLA coach is making the rounds, appearing on radio and television broadcasts wherever he can get attention. Cool. He's also making lots and lots of pre-recorded phone calls. Perhaps not so cool.

"Rrrriiiinggg . . . Rrrriiiinnnggg . . . Hello? [Pause] Who is it? Hi, I'm Rick Neuheisel . . . "

Most of the calls connect to UCLA fans, alums and ticket-holders. But not all of them which makes this interesting. Amusingly, a Georgia fan with no connection to UCLA also got the call and posted the message's audio for your listening enjoyment here.

It's basically a nice pitch about the greatness of UCLA the institution and UCLA the athletic department. At the very end there's a plea to buy season tickets and otherwise is an introduction to the new Bruin coach.

Harmless enough, but it's worth noting that if people with no connection to UCLA are getting the call, others might inadvertently be left with a message as well. Maybe people like hmmm . . . recruits? I don't think there's any funny business going on here, but you never know with Neuheisel and his track record of finding the gray areas when it comes to NCAA recruiting rules and regulations.

News like this makes me so very happy Rick Neuheisel is back in college football. He adds color to the game and should spice up the USC/UCLA rivalry. At the same time, expect more stories just like this to shadow him for the rest of his tenure at UCLA.
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