The NCAA calendar needs a major overhaul
Few weekends in sports can match the excitement of the first weekend of March Madness.
Four days, 48 games, complete with upsets, comebacks and buzzer-beaters. And that’s just the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. There’s also parallel excitement going on all weekend long with the women’s tournament.
But there’s another event the very same weekend that includes everything a sports fan could ever want.
That’s the NCAA Wrestling Championships. Three days, 640 wrestling matches, 10 wrestlers earning championships and 70 more earning medals.
If you’ve never watched wrestling, you should check it out next weekend. Each match has the excitement and emotion of a college basketball game boiled down into seven minutes; and the thrill of a dagger 3-pointer doesn’t even stack up to the thrill of a pin that ends the match right there.
Every year on the third weekend of March, I find myself double-screening and flipping back and forth between channels to try to catch as much basketball and wrestling as I possibly can. I know I’m far from alone in enjoying both sports.
But do these events really need to happen on the same weekend? The answer is no. In fact, there’s really no good reason that the wrestling season has to end in mid-March in the first place.
Why do the NCAA basketball and wrestling championships fall on the same weekend?
I have two theories as to why these events always fall on the same weekend.
The first is that ESPN needs programming during March Madness. The network doesn’t have the rights to any NCAA men’s tournament games, and the women’s tournament can only fill so many time slots. The wrestling championships give ESPN’s family of networks a quality product for six times slots from Thursday through Saturday.
The other has to do with the NCAA’s calendar, in which all winter sports run on pretty much the same timetable.
The men’s basketball tournament, women’s basketball tournament and wrestling championships aren’t even the only NCAA championship events being held next weekend. The NCAA Swimming Championships will also be happening.
In 2021, do we really a uniform calendar for fall, winter and spring sports? It’s a question being asked at the high school level too.
I think I speak for sports editors everywhere when I say it would make our jobs a whole lot easier if different sports held their championships at different times throughout the year. We could cover them all at a higher level if they weren’t competing with each other for our time and attention.
And when you stop and think about it: In this age of specialization, with so few elite athletes playing multiple sports, why can’t each sport have a calendar unique to itself?
Why do football and soccer have to run on similar timelines? Or softball and lacrosse? Or basketball and wrestling?
College baseball coaches are asking the same question, recently authoring a proposal to shift their season back by an entire month because it makes more sense to end in late July than it does to start in mid-February.
Thanks to COVID-19, we can say with certainty that the traditional calendar can be thrown right out the window. In fact, every single NCAA sport — fall, winter and spring — is going on right now at some level (even football) because most conferences pushed their fall sports to the spring this school year.
If college athletic departments can handle all of their sports going on at once, they can handle a calendar optimized for each sport.
Push the entire wrestling season back
Like the college baseball season, the college wrestling season also starts way too early.
The month of November is rarely eventful in college wrestling, with very few big duals and no major tournaments. Some teams barely take the mat.
December also features very few big duals and includes just a couple big tournaments: Cliff Keen Las Vegas early in the month, and the Midlands a few days before New Year’s.
January is when the season heats up, starting with the Southern Scuffle and continuing with big dual meets every weekend.
So why not just start the season with the Midlands a few days before New Year’s? That’s when the season really feels like it’s starting anyway.
The coaches decided to start the wrestling season on Jan. 1 this year because of concerns about COVID-19. It really didn’t feel like we missed much in November and December.
Every wrestling season should start with the Midlands, followed by the Southern Scuffle and a rescheduled Cliff Keen.
Dual meets — the true gems of the sport — should take the spotlight from mid-January all the way through March. With the college football season in the books, wrestling duals could own Friday nights for three months on channels like Big Ten Network and ESPNU.
Conference tournaments should be held in early or mid-April, with the NCAA Tournament held two weeks later, when it could be showcased on ESPN (or another network) at a time when it’s not going head-to-head with the most popular basketball tournament in the world. That could only help boost the popularity of college wrestling.
I’m very much looking forward to settling in next weekend with multiple screens and a clicker in hand to watch as much basketball and wrestling as I can. But I’d be even more excited if these two great events were happening on separate weekends.
Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed this newsletter. If you have thoughts and feedback, I’d love to hear from you. Every newsletter will be posted to this website, so you can comment there. You can also email me directly at this address.
Also, expect a bonus newsletter from me mid-week with some fun college basketball content!
If you stumbled across this newsletter during your web travels, sign up here!
