Recently we had D3 and D4 men's and women's colleges vote to split up their semi's and championship over two weekends with a single team advancing. It's better for the players in so many ways - recovery, safety, more prep time, and even additional B-side match opportunities following playoff matches.

Travel is actually minimized because the higher seeds get home games. The lower seeds would've had to travel anyways to some pre-determined destination that would require a hotel for a two-day tourney. Now it's one and done. If a visiting team wins, sure they have to travel twice, but now they don't need hotels because it's one game per weekend.

The problem lies at the national level. If a territory gets multiple seeds to the national playoffs then TU's are forced to invite additional teams to figure out who's the "second best" and so on. That problem trickles down to the LAU because they want their Union to have a chance to earn all of the National seeds.

My belief is that every league, whether it's a TU league, LAU league, or conference within an LAU or TU should have two seeds advance based on league standings. Teams can grow over the course of the season and that gives the 2nd place team in league play one more chance to continue on. However, once you're in the playoffs - one and done.

For D1 men's clubs it is beyond ridiculous. League play ... LAU playoffs ... TU playoffs ... CR playoffs ... national playoffs. You might play seven league games and then 10 playoff games, most of which are just about seeding and not who advances. That's worse than Hockey and Basketball with their 82 game regular season and possible 28 game playoff season.

Extend the regular season and shrink the playoff structure. Take out some of the layers in between. What's the point of having CR playoffs if every team that competes in them advances? Let the CR champions go right to a national final four. (can I say final four?)

Chip Auscavitch
Executive director of colleges
New England

Bruce has said it best! The playoff structure in rugby is so ridiculous in its current state that there needs to be something done ASAP! There are a few resounding reasons that support this accusation.

Cal may be the only exception to the rule, but for the most part when we (NRU) have our crossover round, where NERFU 1 hosts Met NY 4 and so on, the difference in competition is astounding (same with the Met NY 1 hosting the NERFU 4).

If you must have a crossover scenario for more densely populated territories, then take the #1 team from NERFU and #1 team for Met NY and have them host the #2’s from the other union and the winners advance to the next weekend for the NRU Championship.

The winner advances to play the MARFU champion. There is your CR4 rep for the national playoffs. This solves a few problems – the longevity of each player will increase, the amount of games required to play to make it to that level is reduced from six to three (this reduces the amount of time away from family and work) and the personal/financial burden for each club, player and family will be drastically reduced.

For the national level, I am sure that there is a fair way to break down the country in order to have the east and west end up with one team each and then meet for the national finals. Example (I firmly believe that the SoCal, Pacific, MARFU and NRU set as is. The Midwest, West, South could be realigned to be geographically friendly).

Southern Cal v Pacific and West N v West S (splitting the West in half). The winners would go on to play each other for the Western Region Championship.

NRU v MARFU and Midwest v South. The winners would go on to play each other for the Eastern Region Championship. Obviously, this would bring the finals as East v West.

With the solution (or something similar) above - regular season, then the road to the national championship is five games, at least three (at most five) nights in a hotel, two (at most four) days off work, two roundtrip airfares. There are definite issues that will affect certain clubs that will suffer regardless.

Thanks for the sounding board! Thanks for keeping the rugby world in the loop!

Carrick Pell

Hey, just got a few things to say on Brian's comments [Rugbytalk #36] on Belmont Shore and OMBAC competing in both the Super League and Division One Championships.

They say that the Super League is the premier rugby comp in the USA, therefore Belmont Shore and the rest of the Super League teams should compete in the Division One Championship with full strength teams.

Time wise, I'm not too sure if it could be done but this would give us a good idea of how the Super League is doing talent wise and competitive wise.

Brian also said a few teams didn't deserve to be in the Super League, and I completely agree with him. The Division One Championships would be the perfect place to pit those teams against the potential would-be replacements. Then that would give USA Rugby a real look at how they can make the Super League better.

Teams like Park City Haggis would give a lot of those sides in the Super League a run for their money. Thanks for the time.

Matt Johnson