Notre Dame - National champions!

Congratulations to the men and women of the Notre Dame fencing team. The Irish took first place at NCAAs, holding a consistent lead throughout the tournament and beating Penn State by 7 bouts. This is head coach Janusz Bednarski's third championship, and Notre Dame's second national championship this year (women's soccer).

Basketball isn't the only NCAA championship

As I'm sure you know, the NCAA championships in fencing began yesterday and continue through Sunday. The format is a round robin, so each athlete within a weapon (epee, sabre, and foil are the three weapons) will fence against every other athlete in that weapon, within his or her gender. That is, the men only fence against men, and women against women. The men's competition takes place on Thu and Fri, and the women compete Sat and Sun; every year it flips, so in 2012 the women will fence first.

However, the format of determining the national champion in fencing is unique in that the men's and women's scores are combined. By aggregating the scores, it means that schools must have a strong men's and women's team in order to win.

This seems like great system to encourage equity between male and female student-athletes. Concerns about Title IX can be partially alleviated when performance by both sexes is required to achieve success. The women are just as important as the men in terms of winning a national championship. On the other hand, a school like Northwestern will never win a title: it has a very strong women's team, but its men's program is only club level and thus does not compete at NCAAs.

Is this a good system? Is it fair to Northwestern? Are there any other NCAA sports that operate in this fashion?

By the way, to follow scores live, go to http://www.prisedefer.com/NCAA. Halfway through the competition, the Notre Dame men have a 6 bout lead over Penn State, as well as an individual champion (Ariel DeSmet in foil). It should be an exciting two-day finish in Columbus.

NCAA gets it right

Congratulations NCAA - you didn't kill the golden goose, you just made her more fertile. The NCAA announced today that they were expanding, but only to 68 teams. Four play-in games means space for three new sacrificial lambs teams, and preserves the chance for the David v. Goliath upset to finally happen. Nobody needs to dramatically alter their office pools either, which I'm sure is a relief to the readers of this blog.

The other big news from the announcement is that all games will now be available, in their entirety, to a nationwide audience. While this is dangerous for the Last Channel button on your remote, it's great for fans. This year I hooked up my computer to my TV so I could watch the full Notre Dame game, but the internet signal didn't look too sharp on a 42" TV (even then, I had the TV split so I could watch CBS' live broadcast of other games on one half while keeping an eye on the Irish). With this new CBS/Turner broadcast agreement, picture-in-picture is going to be my default viewing mode for March. On the downside, this further dissuades me from ditching my cable subscription, something I've been trying to do for years.

The NCAA takes a lot of heat when the screw something up, so let's give them credit for getting something right here.