ASUN Applies for 2022 NCAA Tournament AQ | Syracusefan.com

ASUN Applies for 2022 NCAA Tournament AQ

JeremyCuse said:
I hope the NCAA reviews it thoroughly before just giving out another Auto Bid. Unless they can get Jacksonville and a few other schools not sure that conference is worth an Auto bid even with Utah.
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We go back to 18 teams in.

2 play in games.

Although looking at Utah's schedule this year, I thought they were auditioning for the ACC. :D
 
JeremyCuse said:
I hope the NCAA reviews it thoroughly before just giving out another Auto Bid. Unless they can get Jacksonville and a few other schools not sure that conference is worth an Auto bid even with Utah.
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They can't make value judgements of "worthiness" under the D-1 rules. If six teams get permission from a conference's leadership to play as a conference, they get an AQ. That said, they can say that a conference's record requires them to be in a play-in game.
 
OrangeXtreme said:
We go back to 18 teams in.

2 play in games.

Although looking at Utah's schedule this year, I thought they were auditioning for the ACC. :D
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When they said they were going to have a team, I said we should explore letting them be a member just for lacrosse.
 
Point 2 that Terry mentioned there is very important. No D1 athletic department is going to want to add a sport that they know they have no shot in competing or a conference to play in. It makes it much more difficult to fund, recruit, get alumni donations and find home games if you don't have a way to get into the NCAAs. By having a conference AQ, it opens the door for more teams to potentially add D1 lacrosse. And although it might not be the big SEC or Pac12 teams at this point, the ASUN has schools like Florida Gulf Coast, North Florida, Eastern Kentucky and Kennesaw State that could see this as a reason to look into adding lacrosse.
 
They would have to add another at-large bid, if they don't make this a PIG.
 
Mercer is in the A-Sun for lacrosse so it's pretty cool for me in that regard. However, we stink in lacrosse, so I don't think the automatic bid will be a big factor for us in the near future.
 
MSOrange said:
Mercer is in the A-Sun for lacrosse so it's pretty cool for me in that regard. However, we stink in lacrosse, so I don't think the automatic bid will be a big factor for us in the near future.
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Are you sure? I thought Mercer was the SoCon for lacrosse.

Southern Conference

The official 2021 Men's Lacrosse Standings for Southern Conference
soconsports.com soconsports.com
 
Orangelax said:
Are you sure? I thought Mercer was the SoCon for lacrosse.

Southern Conference

The official 2021 Men's Lacrosse Standings for Southern Conference
soconsports.com soconsports.com
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You are right. We started off in the A-Sun before the Southern Conference started sponsoring lacrosse
 
PhatOrange said:
I'm all for expanding the tournament.
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Either expand the tournament or have zero automatic qualifiers for conferences. Sadly, there have been so few automatic qualifiers who make it to the second round and it burns me when good programs with strong records get shafted to make room for a lower quality team... just for that team to get smoked by a blue blood in round 1.
 
SkyTopBus44 said:
Either expand the tournament or have zero automatic qualifiers for conferences. Sadly, there have been so few automatic qualifiers who make it to the second round and it burns me when good programs with strong records get shafted to make room for a lower quality team... just for that team to get smoked by a blue blood in round 1.
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Automatic qualifiers are stupid in any sport. Just select the best teams period. But I'm all for expanding the tournament(s) - all divisions.

There was a D3 team 2 years ago in Boston that went 16-2 and they lost their conference championship game and didn't get an NCAA invite. That's ridiculous.
 
PhatOrange said:
Automatic qualifiers are stupid in any sport. Just select the best teams period. But I'm all for expanding the tournament(s) - all divisions.

There was a D3 team 2 years ago in Boston that went 16-2 and they lost their conference championship game and didn't get an NCAA invite. That's ridiculous.
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74 division 1 men's lacrosse teams
18 team tournament field
9 automatic qualifying conference bids (the determined bottom 2 leagues compete in the play in game)
9 at large teams

Just feels wrong to me.
 
SkyTopBus44 said:
74 division 1 men's lacrosse teams
18 team tournament field
9 automatic qualifying conference bids (the determined bottom 2 leagues compete in the play in game)
9 at large teams

Just feels wrong to me.
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I haven't dug into this at all so I'm just shooting from the hip here.

18 teams for D1 sounds fine minus the auto bids. If we want auto-bids, then I would definitely put way more stock in a team who wins the regular season conference title. I might expand to 24. I think it it's actually good for the game. Besides men's basketball, what are the biggest NCAA D1 tournaments? (I didn't look.)

D2 has about the same number of total teams (75ish) and their tourney only has 12 teams. Not enough. The D2 footprint is huge covering, for example, Colorado (3), Tennessee (2), Missouri (3), Florida (8), Georgia (3), Utah (1) and even West Virginia (4) and Alabama (2). WV has more D2 schools than Massachusetts go figure. I think with this tournament I'd regionalize it and go 4 brackets of 4 teams (West, Midwest, South and North) . 16 teams to start, maybe as many as 24.

D3 has 250 schools playing lacrosse and a 36 team tournament (at least they did in 2019.). I think they may be reducing the size of the tournament which would be a terrible idea imo. 36 is cool. With that number you're getting most of the best teams, not all but most. (see my Lasell example). And I'm not concerned with who has a legit chance to win, I'm more concerned with rewarding teams (kids) who had great seasons.

I like seeing more teams included. D2 in particular is too small. There are a lot of good teams left out and some really good players.
 
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Auto-bids aren't put in place to make the best tournament. They are in place to make sure every team has a route to a championship. Schools aren't going to sponsor a sport if there is no way to compete to win the championship. One of the biggest recruiting tools the mid-level teams have is "we are competitive in our conference, and once you win the conference tournament, you're in the NCAA tournament". If you take that from these programs, it shifts all the balance to only the top programs. Look at the college football playoffs right now that has no auto-bid. Almost every year it is: Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State (+ 1 other team). You'd have almost the same top 10-15 teams every year, and then a few "surprise" teams to fill in the rest of the tournament. And when you'd get down to the last picks, you'd still have to decide something along the lines of: do you take a Big 10 team with a losing record but played top competition or do you take the ASUN team that went 12-2 but didn't play anybody? (And in both cases, the teams outside the top 10-15 are typically not a huge threat to win the championship anyways)

For the comments based around number of teams in the playoffs, I'm pretty sure the size of the tournament is based on a percentage of how many D1/D2/D3 teams there are (Something like ~25% for D1, ~20% for D2, ~15% for D3, not completely accurate numbers but a guess). So the tournament size couldn't be increased unless more teams join.
 
OrangeXtreme said:
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Turned one dog conference into two, without adding any new teams. GROW THE GAME! :rolleyes:

I know I'm a cynic, but what constitutes "big" news to the lacrosse media, doesnt amount to much with me.
 
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