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I had this really cool column lined up for this week. I had done a nice little piece of research to show how much it helped for the second-best team in a four-team regional to get to host it (short answer: not much, if any at all; maybe I'll still run that out during a slow week this summer). All of a sudden, the world has been turned upside down, and I need to write about some changes that I haven't fully digested yet.

The news has been covered well by Baseball America in these two articles: here and here, so I'll just recap here. Back in February, the NCAA announced that they were planning to emphasize geography over accomplishment in distributing the postseason fields for the spring sports this year in response to the events of 9/11. This week they dropped the other shoe; more details were released about the rules, and the fields were announced for some of the sports. The new setup has already raised significant controversy in the golf and softball communities, as all the #1 seeds in softball were sent on the road and the top four ranked golf teams are all in the same regional.

The changes, in a nutshell, are that the restrictions on conference opponents meeting in a regional have been relaxed so that they can be in the same regional but can't meet in the first round, and regionals will be designed in order to minimize the number of teams needing plane travel rather than to evenly distribute quality. Since the explicit goal of the tournament is no longer to design the field to choose the best team but to minimize the amount of travel, the odds of the best team winning have dropped significantly. I'll deal more with the moral overtones of this decision later, but what does it actually mean?

As an experiment, I took last year's field and this year's travel rules and designed a regional layout. I'm making a couple of assumptions there, that the committee will have the integrity to at least not change the selection of the 16 #1 seeds or the 64 teams in the field. Here are the things I learned during that exercise, good and bad:

• A lot of #1 seeds are going to have to travel. The problem is that the tournament field as a whole is not distributed throughout the country in the same way that the #1 seeds are. Last year, it would have been essentially impossible for all of Rice, LSU, Tulane, and South Alabama to all fill up regionals close to home. This year, under the old rules, I would have expected Rice, Houston, and Texas to all host; there's no way that happens now, so Houston's mild late-season slide looks especially bad. Add to that the fact there were 13 teams (nine of them in the Northeast) who weren't within the NCAA 400-mile limit for bus trips of any of the #1 seeds, and some of the #1 seeds are going to be shipped to the Northeast. That's not a completely bad thing for them, though, because they should have a trivially easy field waiting for them there -- imagine if Tulane had been sent to face a regional with UMBC, Temple, and Delaware.

  This problem is even more exaggerated in baseball than in softball because of the doubled number of regionals. Whether or not the baseball committee decides to handle it the way the softball committee did by sending all the #1's on the road remains to be seen -- I've seen a couple of quotes from committee members indicating that they're not wild about this either, so that will have to be watched to see how it plays out.

  This is not an inherently bad thing from a competitive and growth-of-the-sport point of view; there's no inherent fairness reason to hold the competitions at the best teams' homes. If it increases the move toward off-campus venues, I think that's an especially good thing.

• Even more so than the already unacceptably bad balance in the past, there are going to be some really strong regionals and some really weak ones. We talked about the Northeast already. Last year, there would have probably been three California regionals -- there were eight California teams plus Arizona State, who's 380 or so miles from Los Angeles. All nine of those teams were in the ISR top 25.

• It's very likely that this move (there's been no word on whether this is intended to last into future seasons; I doubt anyone in Indianapolis has thought about it) will lead to one of the NCAA's other goals being accomplished -- it's quite possible that there will be a cold weather team in Omaha this year. I haven't seen any announcements about the super-regionals (I think baseball is the only sport that uses them), but I'm assuming that they're going to try to minimize travel there, too. That would imply that two Northeastern regionals will be matched up, and that there may be a Midwest-Northeast matchup as well. The only thing that could prevent it is strong #1 seeds being sent in. There really aren't any cold weather teams that deserve a #1 this year, or even look like they do, unless you count Richmond or Wichita State (neither of whom deserve one, but both of whom are close enough to get one if the committee has a different agenda), but it's not impossible to imagine the Big 10 and Big East champions being given undeserved #1's to help the process along.

• The 400-mile limit creates all sorts of interesting possibilites, some of which may help to make #1's leave home. For example, it's around 385 miles from Auburn to New Orleans, and about 415 from Auburn to Baton Rouge. The closest one I've found, by the way, which doesn't matter this year, is that it's 398 miles from Knoxville to Starkville.

There are some actions that are so obviously wrong that it's not worth a whole lot of breath condemning them, but I'll close this part with a few relevant quotes:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin

I ask you to live your lives and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.

I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity; they did not touch its source. -- George W. Bush

Money is not the issue here. Safety is the issue. -- Jim Wright, NCAA Director of Statistics

Many thanks to Erin Breed and the gang at KZNE in College Station for having me on Monday night. For those of you in the Wichita area, I'll be talking with Phil Stephenson on KQAM on Thursday afternoon, May 16, at 4:30.

Next week, I'll do a last look at who's likely to get into the tournament and who's not. I'll try to get that out on Tuesday so that you can take a look at it before the conference tournaments start so you'll know who needs to do what.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye or, on the other hand, starts where pitchers were pulled according to plan early despite pitching extremely well in close games.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> A World Upside Down

About the author, Boyd Nation