Tuesday, February 26, 2008
With the baseball season finally underway, teams will begin to feel the effects of the universal start date imposed by the NCAA.
The rule forced teams to wait three extra weeks to play their first games, condensing schools’ 56-game schedules into a much tighter time frame of 12 weeks, rather than 15. One of the biggest differences coaches anticipate is greater significance on midweek games.
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Given the distance Kansas will have to travel for some midweek games and the short time between some weekend and midweek series, few gaps exist to reschedule games in the event of rainout
As always, teams must win most midweek games if they hope to reach the NCAA tournament. However, teams will need to play their midweek games as scheduled or risk having to drop them from their schedules. Given three fewer weeks of wiggle room to reschedule rainouts, coaches are keeping their fingers crossed for a dry spring.
“Those games are as important as the weekend series are at the end of the season if you’re going to win 40 times and get an NCAA tournament berth,” Kansas coach Ritch Price said at last week’s Kansas Baseball Media Day.
Kansas plays its first midweek game Wednesday at Arkansas. Later this season Kansas also plays at Missouri State, at No. 20 Wichita State and at Kauffman Stadium against No. 5 Missouri. Three other times, Kansas will play Tuesday-Wednesday midweek series between weekend series.
Given the distance Kansas will have to travel for some midweek games and the short time between some weekend and midweek series, few gaps exist to reschedule games in the event of rainouts.
“Basically, there is none,” Price said. “If you lose a Tuesday-Wednesday game, your only alternative would be to play that on a Thursday before a conference series and I don’t see many people doing that.”
Further restricting Price’s scheduling flexibility is Kansas’ 10-day missed class policy. The policy restricts players from missing more than 10 days of class for games and Kansas has already filled the 10-day limit on its schedule.
Judging by last week’s Big 12 Coaches Teleconference, Price isn’t the only Big 12 coach feeling pressed for scheduling freedom. Among others, Baylor coach Steve Smith—who wasn’t opposed to the rule change—said scheduling conflicts could have been avoided if the end of the season had been pushed back.
Smith said, “The vast majority still support it—that the end of the season would be pushed back a couple of weeks. The NCAA board of directors slammed the door on that immediately and the thing was too far down the legislative pipeline to really go back and reverse track. Nobody ever intended to cram 56 games into the weeks that we’ve got.”
—Edited by Nick Mangiaracina
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Comments
Shortened season may cause problems for players
Really...Noone has tried to play 56 games in this time period before? I guess you have never looked at some Northern schools schedules which are loaded with WEEKDAY games for the last few years giving the Southern schools maybe one mid-week game.
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