Q&A: The Regional Concept

by Jac Coyne | MCLA.us

LA CROSSE, Wis. – Chris Brewster checked in with a question about the plausibility of going to a regionalized format for the MCLA tournament. Let’s take a look [edited for grammar and space].

QUESTION: What do you think of this admittedly out-of-the-box idea:

1. Eliminate conference tournaments. (AQ is a formality for the best, and it is a cost burden for most – for the others, see No. 3)

2. Award the conference champ the benefit of hosting a regional pod the weekend that is otherwise conference tournaments – or host in their nearest hub city. (Nine conferences, but eight regional pods, so need a tiebreaker for the eighth and ninth best conference champ, plus a premium on regular season games is always good IMO...)

3. Invite the three best regional teams by rankings to the pod – expand the tournament to 32 teams so bubble teams in the 16-team format are back in, far less travel expense than even conference tournaments, and still room for a Cinderella story.

4. The pods are a Thursday-Saturday or Friday-Sunday format most teams are used to, and the pod champs move on to national site

5. Admittedly some regional shifts may need to occur, but some simple rules of no more than one top five team per pod, and no more than two top 12 teams per pod would take care of that.

6. The “Elite 8” then travel to the national site the following week for a far less rigorous tournament, and one far less likely to have mismatches. The 16 seed no longer has to travel across the country to have the pleasure of losing to the number 1 team by 20 on a Monday of a school week right before finals (but they still had their puncher’s chance in the regional pods).

Out of the box? Yes. But I tested it this year and it seemed to work great – far less travel, all reasonable bubble teams in, regional pods with better competition than conference tournaments, and only those that probably saw conference tournaments as a costly burden/obligation end early.

ANSWER: Thanks, Chris. The regional – or pod – concept is nothing new and it’s something that I posited back nearly 20 years ago when I first started covering the MCLA for US Lacrosse. It has its merits, but it also has some pretty significant flaws.

As for your particular paradigm, we can move off of a 32-team tourney pretty quickly. It would be a stretch in Division I and a complete non-starter in D-II. One could argue 16 is pushing the limits some years. If you’re looking to avoid 20-goal blowouts, expanding the tourney is not the answer. With this alteration, the first round and quarterfinals would be the first weekend then the semifinals and finals the following weekend.

The biggest issue of the regional tournament feeding into nationals is it assumes, for the most part, that all conferences are created equal. And we know that is definitely not the case in each division. In the last four years alone, we’ve had two conference – and what would likely regional opponents in that model – teams facing each other in the championship game at both levels. The SELC’s Georgia Tech and South Carolina clashed in the title game in 2022 and the RMLC’s Utah Valley and Brigham Young went head-to-head in ’24. Similarly, Dayton-St. Thomas and St. Thomas-Grand Valley were UMLC rematches in ’22 and this spring.

If the first two rounds of the tournament are regionalized, then none of those four games happen. And potentially this year’s Georgia Tech-Liberty contest doesn’t occur because the SELC and ALC are so adjacent as to be easily conjoined. Unless you’re going to start shipping higher-ranked teams out of loaded pods, the final eight matchups could be as lopsided as any of our current first round matchups. In Division I, you’d have to send Florida to the Pacific Northwest and Colorado to the Upper Midwest.

Secondly, for as many inefficiencies as the current week-long format has, it is far better logistically than sending four teams to one regional site for two total games before shipping the remaining four in each division off to another location for the semifinals.

Let’s see how a regional format would work out, roughly, this year (we’re just doing 16, as 32 is not going to happen). We’ll move off the straight seeding format, because that would have three pods in the Southeast, which would make the whole thing moot in terms of travel costs for the bulk of the participants.

Division I

SALT LAKE CITY
No. 15 Boise State v. No. 2 Utah Valley
No. 11 Colorado No. 5 Brigham Young

RICHMOND
No. 9 Florida State v. No. 1 Liberty
No. 4 Florida v. No. 3 Georgia Tech

SAN DIEGO
No. 13 San Diego State v. No. 8 Arizona State
No. 12 Cal Poly v. No. 10 UC Santa Barbara

AUSTIN
No. 16 Minnesota v. No. 6 Texas
No. 14 Tennessee v. No. 7 Northeastern

Division II

ATLANTA
No. 14 Rhode Island v. No. 1 Florida Atlantic
No. 13 Wake Forest v. No. 9 UNC-Charlotte

CHICAGO
No. 10 North Dakota State v. No. 2 Grand Valley State
No. 7 Montana State v. No. 4 St. Thomas

DENVER
No. 12 Montana v. No. 3 Northwest Nazarene
No. 11 Air Force v. No. 8 Utah State

LAS VEGAS
No. 16 UC Davis v. No. 5 Cal State San Marcos
No. 15 College of Idaho v. No. 6 UC San Diego

Would this have necessarily changed who won this year’s tournament? Who’s to say, as we would likely have to re-seed after the quarterfinals. Still, we’ll have to pay for fields, equipment and staffing at eight different locations before then getting everything ready for the quarterfinals at the final location. The travel will certainly be more expensive for the remaining four teams who have to jump to two places in a week.

When I took this job I spoke about being an “ideas” league, pushing traditional thinking to give the MCLA the best product, so I love you going outside the box, Chris. For this particular concept, it’s somewhat redundant – the conference tournaments already does much of the pod structure – and it would be doubly taxing on participant budgets. But maybe there is something I'm missing? Thanks for the email.

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