This article may make a difference in some views on if we should shorten the season or not. Some peoples reasoning was so that our wrestlers could go watch the NCAA's. Well that may still be an option with our season the way it is.
I copied this, as it wouldn't let me put the direct link in.
Possible season schedule changes on NCAA horizon?
by Andy Hamilton
Saturday, July 30, 2016 7:07 a.m.
The task force sub-committee assigned to examine college wrestling's long-term health has unveiled a series of sport-altering recommendations, including one that would shift the schedule back nearly a month.
The idea of moving the NCAA Championships away from college basketball's March Madness has been a decades-long conversation piece for wrestling coaches and fans, but the topic has seemingly been stalemated in recent years. In February, however, a team of prominent administrators with wrestling ties collaborated with several college coaches to launch the Blue Ribbon Task Force, rekindling talks of altering the schedule in the process of constructing a five-year strategic plan for the sport.
“(Big 12 commissioner) Bob Bowlsby and the group got together and felt it was a critical time – not just for wrestling but a lot of the sports – given the Power 5 evolution and some of the other things going on,” Jim Fallis, the facilitator for the Blue Ribbon Task Force and former Northern Arizona athletic director, told Trackwrestling. “There's a group of administrators that felt now's a good time and a critical time for wrestling to really take a look at itself and do a 360 evaluation and figure out where do we want to be in five, 10, 15 years and how is the best way to get there?”
Fallis made a presentation Saturday at the National Wrestling Coaches Association annual convention that delved deeper into recommendations made by the group's sub-committees. His PowerPoint has been shared with Division-I head coaches. In it, there are recommendations geared toward academic enhancement, reducing the time demands placed on student-athletes, meeting health and safety objectives, strengthening the sport for spectators and the media, and helping women's wrestling in its quest to establish emerging sport status with the NCAA.
“Right now, everything's on the table,” Ohio State coach Tom Ryan said. “I don't think there's anything that's off the table. Student-athlete welfare, academic issues are on the table, concussions are on the table, how do we grow fan support? Right now, this is a 30,000-foot view of the sport. What do we need to do to correct some of the things that have become issues?”
“Forfeits are somewhat of an issue. You look at how can you have the sport if you can't field a full team? How do we navigate through the forfeit issue? The weight management, the weight cutting, some of the guidelines that are in place from a weight management standpoint. Are those hamstringing some coaches in decisions to move some guys around so you don't have forfeits? Can we get any wiggle room there? Can we look at that and make sure our student-athletes but there are some things that are a little bit more rational than where we are now? Potentially, no redshirts? It shouldn't be off the table that you can't redshirt. You're diluting your team by one-fifth when you redshirt (true freshmen). You come in as a freshman and you have four years to wrestle. We're looking at everything. I, personally, don't believe a sport can continue to exist if two teams can't field a full team. We've got to explore everything. I don't think these changes will be really swift, but we're hoping, our utopia date, is by 2019 there are some drastic changes that give wrestling a new look.”
The biggest attention-grabber in the document might be the section that outlines a reconfigured schedule. One recommendation for a modified wrestling calendar would designate Nov. 1 as the first day of organized practices. The competition season wouldn't begin until after Christmas and the NCAA Championships would be held in late April. In a perfect world, Ryan said the redesigned schedule would be in place in time for a national championship event to be held in April of 2019.
“Right now, the early discussions with the coaches, it's basically unanimous,” he said. “The discussions this weekend were heavily in favor of exploring that idea of starting after Thanksgiving practice and having a national championship sometime in April, perhaps the third week in April. There will be a lot of research, and I think we've got some great people on the Blue Ribbon Task Force with Bob Bowlsby and (North Carolina State athletic director) Debbie Yow and some of the people who have volunteered their time to really help us navigate through the NCAA system and get this done. I think that will happen.”
Ryan said it's important for wrestling to keep its identity as a sport while “always taking into consideration the consumer” and exploring the ways to attract the casual spectator.
Said Fallis: “One of the most frustrating things to me: We were at the national championships in Oklahoma City two years ago and USA Today's sports section – the day before the tournament started – had a little blurb that talked about how much beer they expected to be consumed in Oklahoma City for the NCAA wrestling championship. And the next three days you didn't see a thing about the wrestling tournament. But obviously you saw tons of things about basketball.”
“If you were to move the tournament into, let's say, mid-April or later in April, obviously you get away from the NCAA basketball tournament. Now you can't just do that and not do something on the front end because what you're doing is effectively extending the season. The concept of a one-semester sport now has a lot more merit.”
“It has the potential of enhancing academics, it has the potential of reducing time demands on the student-athlete, it has the potential of helping their mental health state of mind, it has the potential of increasing fan interest, especially at the nationals two or three weeks after the Final Four.”
Fallis said the sub-committee recommendations will likely be presented to the Blue Ribbon Task Force sometime in August.
“Typically, what I would envision happening is they would look at everything, develop a strategic plan and then present that strategic plan to the universities that sponsor Division-I wrestling and say, ‘This is what we feel needs to happen in the sport,’” he said. “What we're talking about and doing now and what we're vetting at this point does not necessarily mean that's what the final product will be.”
