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06-01-2024, 02:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-01-2024, 02:28 PM by
OCcardinal.)
Until around 2018, they used to count 20 sports and you could count either Indoor or Outdoor track (not both). Texas wouldn't have won their 2 recent Director's Cups without those changes.
It's like the the US News college rankings. When those first came out Stanford was winning every year because it was based entirely on a survey about academic reputation. That wasn't going to change much from year to year so they started mixing up the methodology so schools would bounce around and you'd have a reason to buy the magazine.
Stanford was pretty much always going to win the Director's Cup every year because it's consistently good at more sports than most colleges sponsor. But to make things "fair" they decided to cut the number of sports that can be counted. The stated reason was because the average number of sponsored sports in D! is 19, only 19 should count. But I don't understand what the average has to do with anything. It's an award for the best all around college sports program. If you are sponsoring more sports than another college (and doing well in those sports) you are, by definition, a better sports program. It's also significantly more challenging to do well across the board if you are spreading your limited sports budget among more sports. (A lot of commentators, for example, have been saying Arizona should cut some of its sports so it can focus on the big sports and do better in them.) If having a lot of sports were all it took, Ohio State, who has more sports than Stanford, should win every year.
And if you are going to talk about something unfair, getting to count the same athletes competing in pretty much the same events twice - for indoor and outdoor track - is unquestionably unfair (especially if you are going to limit the sports that count). A fairer result would be to say you can count both, but only if you sponsor 19 or fewer total NCAA sports. It's not fair to let Texas double-count track when they also have a beach volleyball team out there with a losing record.
The other thing that people don't realize is that the Director's Cup alters the points you get based on size of the NCAA playoff pool. For example, Stanford was ranked #7 in Men's Volleyball heading into NCAA's but got 0 Director's Cup points for that sport because they weren't one of the 8 teams that qualified for the tournament (most playoff spots are filled by automatic qualifiers). But in Women's Volleyball you get 72 points if you lose in the Elite 8 (5-8th place), 64 points if you lose in the Sweet 16 (9-16th place) and 50 points if you lose in the 2nd round (17-32nd place). Similarly a 5th place team in field hockey earns only 64 points while, again, a similar women's volleyball team picks up 72 points.
I also don't buy that having fewer colleges sponsor a sport necessarily makes it easier for strong programs to regularly score Director's Cup points in that sport. That would be true if talent were equally dispersed, but that is not the case. For example, there are a lot of football programs, but only 16 picked up 5 star recruits last year. If there were only 24 football programs and only 8 made the NCAAs, each team would be filled to the brim with talent and it would be awfully challenging for any given program to make the NCAAs every year.
