NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championship Committee Releases Meeting Notes

The NCAA Division I Men's Lacrosse Committee -- a real thing that meets to discuss things other than how handsome I am -- held a two-day meeting in August and numerous topics were battered about. Among the discussion points were: the format of The Big Barbecue; automatic qualifiers for the 2015 NCAA Tournament; a review of the 2014 NCAA Tournament; and requests on a go-forward basis that will impact lacrosse's May adventure. Here are the highlights from the meeting minutes.

Key Items

I. Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) Calculation

The committee wanted to let Earth know that they're tracking the impact of the RPI on scheduling. Which is, of course, a complete waste of time because the RPI is stupid person math for stupid people. But they're monitoring it! [mouth vomit]

II. Regular-Season Schedule

The committee doesn't want regular season games on Selection Sunday and wants any championship games played on that day to start at or before 1:00 P.M. (Eastern). Boooooooooooring.

III. Championship Format

The committee discussed bracket expansion models for the future. None of those models are included in the meeting minutes, but the committee asserts that it is prepared to provide a recommendation at the appropriate time. If one of these models does not include an all-genetically-engineered-dinosaur bracket, I will be disappointed.

Action Items

I. Automatic Qualifiers

10 conferences -- America East, ACC, Big East, Big Ten, THUNDERDOME!, Ivy, MAAC, NEC, Patriot, and Southern -- are all approved for automatic bids to the 2015 NCAA Tournament. There are no surprises in that group, with the Big Ten and Southern getting free passes to The Big Barbecue in their first seasons of existence. The four lowest ranking automatic qualifiers -- regardless of conference RPI -- will participate in the play-in games again (this still makes anger happen in my brain).

That's it for action. There is no other action. This makes Dead Teddy Roosevelt upset.

Informational Items

I. Review of 2014 Championship

There is a bunch of stuff here, some of which is kind of surprising:

• The committee wants feedback from Division I's membership about the holding quarterfinal games at non-predetermined sites with the higher-seeded team hosting. That's . . . that's a pretty big potential departure from the current system that the NCAA has in place. Extinguishing neutral site -- or theoretically neutral site -- games from the quarterfinal round would no longer provide an audition for potential Championship Weekend hosts.
• The committee reviewed the tournament improvement plan that staff developed and discussed ways to increase attendance. There was no picture of a dead horse taking a beating, so it's unclear the exact ground that was covered other than "the tournament should be improved and attendance needs to increase."
• The committee is going to explore decoupling the USILA All Star game from The Linc this coming spring, only because The Linc has a natural grass surface. That's . . . that's actually some solid forward thinking. Grape job!
• Travel -- the committee is recommending expanding the ground mileage radius from 400 to 450 miles. That will impact flights and -- apparently -- provide more flexibility for the committee to maintain bracket integrity. (The counterpoint to this argument is to not have a ground mileage radius restriction, thereby creating maximum bracket integrity through no limitations on how teams must travel. But that is not going to happen.)

Is there anything else that stuck out to you?