How to Improve the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship

Good evening, Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) fans!!! Hope you all had a great weekend!!

As college basketball and spring college  football are done for the year, we have sporting events that tide us over until college football starts again in the fall.  And we’re talking about the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship – we have some really good television for the month of May as we watch these games.

The NCAA, however, can make a lot of improvement to Men’s Lacrosse Championship with a few simple tweaks.  Here we go:

1. Provide the top four seeds with two home games rather just one (that means I’m saying get rid of the quarterfinal sites ASAP).  Why am I saying this?  It would reward performance in the regular season.  If the top seed loses, the next highest seed gets to host the playoff in the next round.
2. The championship has provided seven straight years of attendance declines.  Yeesh.  The NCAA needs to make the ticket tougher – and that means potentially holding it in a smaller venue than Boston’s Gillette Stadium or Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium.  Hold it, for example, in a smaller soccer stadium that seats 25,000 or so – don’t have the event in a half empty facility.  Make the ticket hard to get – and future sales might improve.
3. Consider finding a permanent home (like Baltimore) for the championship like the NCAA does for softball (Oklahoma City).   The flip side here is that allowing the event to be held in other locations would help grow the sport.  However, the State of Maryland (and the greater DMV) lacrosse fan base is so large that a permanent home for the championship might be considered.  Consider this – there are five men’s lacrosse teams this year from the State of Maryland, including Navy, Maryland, Loyola, UMBC, and Towson (incidentally, four of these five have advanced to this year’s quarterfinals) – that’s a pretty large fanbase.  Maryland and the greater DMV also has some very elite high school lacrosse.  A permanent home in Baltimore for Championship weekend is certainly something to consider.

And that’s it for tonight – your thoughts?

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