(05-24-2014 07:29 PM)Big Ron Buckeye Wrote: Two weeks would make a difference but not enough for the average Joe family man to bring his family out to the ballpark in early-mid March.
That article also notes the obstacle, which is that southern schools are massively gaming the system and will strongly oppose any complete overhaul that threatens to overturn their dominance.
I like that article and like the argument, but it is a bit of an ambit claim, and any reform that actually gets enacted is likely to be more modest than that. Fortunately we now have a system in which four of the five P5 conferences have membership that are on the "northern" side of the line, and the fifth has a newfound commercial interest in getting more of the college season out from under the shadow of the NCAA BBall tournament.
But with respect to getting average Joe family man to bring his family out to the ballpark in early-mid March ... under the polled proposal, the focus would be to market the beginning of conference play as the "real" beginning of the season, and try to get them out to the ballpark in April.
Certainly three weeks would be even better than two, then first week of conference play for most of the Big Ten (and, indeed, for most conferences) would be the weekend after the NCAA BBall championship. Especially for conference networks like the SECN and BTN, whatever they are doing during the Big Dance will be largely drowned out, so promoting "the start of conference baseball season" gets a lot easier when the BBall tournament and all its associated hype and hoopla concludes.
Four weeks would be even better, and four weeks would be just about as far as the current NCAA system could be stretched ... it would have conference tournaments ending just before the end of the athletic year, which is the last day in June, and all of the NCAA championships exempted to spill over into the pro forma start of the next athletic year.