With the NCAA Division 1 tournament expanding to 18 teams in 2014, it is time to look at enhancing the tournament and the championship. Below are some of my suggestions to improve the tournament in the future.
With 18 teams now in the tournament, we should strategically look at having a first four format similar to college basketball. Matchup two At-large teams vs. two Automatic Qualifiers and play on a Wednesday Night at a neutral site. Have a University like Loyola or Stony Brook host the 1st Four on Wednesday and make it a made for TV event. Important: Call this first four the 1st round for bracket purposes. The winners of these games play on Sunday in the 2nd Round.
Eight Games in the 2nd Round at 4 venues. In the current format, 8 teams get home games. In my format only the top 4 seeded teams get home games. So for the purpose of TV, you have four sites: 2 sets of doubleheaders on Saturday and 2 on Sunday. For example here is what the 2013 sites would have looked like in my format:
Host Sites: Syracuse, Denver, Notre Dame and Ohio State
1 Syracuse vs. Bryant 8 Penn State vs. Yale
4 Denver vs. Albany 5 North Carolina vs. Lehigh
2 Notre Dame vs. Detroit 7 Duke vs. Loyola
3 Ohio State vs. Towson 6 Maryland vs. Cornell
Quarterfinals will again be played at Neutral sites and NCAA should really look into venues smaller than twenty five thousand seats. Venues like Toyota Park in Illinois, Toyota Stadium in Texas, Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Colorado and Stub HUB Center in California are ideal for the Quarterfinals. My thought here is to have one quarterfinal in a city that can be a potential host of the championship in the future.
Semifinals/Finals, this is one area of the game I would love to see stay the same. The NFL venue experience is second to none. I would like to have a destination to go to besides the east coast venues of Boston/Baltimore/Philadelphia and you can skip the Meadowlands as well. Texas, California and Colorado are where the game is growing, we have to look into taking our marquee event there.
As you can see, I have not given a timeline of the dates for the tournament. I feel that we should explore championship weekend being moved back one week to the 1st weekend in June. (Yes we can achieve this by having no lacrosse games until after Super Bowl Sunday!) After the doubleheader on Saturday, have the championship in prime-time on a Monday Night.
CHAMBO’S PRESEASON TOP 10 DIVISON 3
Stevenson
RIT
Salisbury
Tufts
Cortland
Nazareth
Lynchburg
Dickinson
Roanoke
Cabrini
Follow me on twitter: @bchambeaux15
