News from baseball coaches' convention

[AusTexDawg]

Here are some of the items discussed at last weekend baseball coaches' convention, per D1 Baseball:

• Surveys show strong support for additional recruiting dead periods during Conference tourneys, regionals, opening weekend of CWS and July 4th (It's probably enough that some coaches have to re-recruit some of their low-round draft-eligible players during the postseason)
• Interest in expanding fall dead period, but no legislation yet, to encourage high school players to shut down pitching beginning in mid-October and discourage late fall showcases
• Debated not allowing unofficial visits before September 1 of high school sophomore year and forcing coaches to honor offers to younger kids.
• NCAA Division I Council will vote in April whether to allow 4 fall exhibition games as long as travel < 400 mi. and no class is missed. Softball currently gets 8 fall exhibitions. (if we're going to play JSU, Valley or Alcorn, maybe some of those games would fit here to reduce the hit to RPI in the spring. Also, some of us might be interested in Delta State here)
• Ray Tanner, who's also the chair of Div. I baseball committee, and others think baseball could get a 4th paid coach. Per TCU's Jim Schlossnagle, "Coach Tanner feels like we can piggyback on [the newly-added 10th football coach slot], hopefully, to have a shot ? if you?re at practice (and not on the road recruiting).? (Given the pushback from the smaller programs against raising the scholarship cap, I think this is going to be a hard sell. The P5 schools don't have the weight in baseball that they do in football since there's no real threat that they would pull out and not play the smaller schools)

[5049]

How about extra scholarships for the players? Noble concept I know.

[BulldogDX55]

How about extra scholarships for the players? Noble concept I know.

I support this completely wild and novel plan.

[Leeshouldveflanked]

How about extra scholarships for the players? Noble concept I know.

LSU, UGA and Vandy already have this figured out

[5049]

LSU, UGA and Vandy already have this figured out

And Florida, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Miami.

Which makes me wonder why Tennessee sucks so bad.

[Choctaw Dawg]

Every single one of those teams surround Tennessee, Tennessee just doesn't promote baseball to the point that kids would want to come and they never really had stellar coaching either.

[msbulldog]

Hey Guys, a bill for legalizing the lottery in Mississippi has been introduced in the legislature this session. Call your legislators (Hell most of ya'll probably know them) and tell them to make the revenues support higher education. This is what Louisiana, Georgia and Tennessee do and they use that scholarship money to fund additional scholarships for their baseball programs. C'mon guys get behind this and give the Bulldawgs and even playing field! Hail State!

[Irondawg]

I haven?t studied it so I?ll ask the dumb question of why baseball has so few schollies? Title 9?

And if it?s that is it because of football high scholly numbers?

[Todd4State]

I haven?t studied it so I?ll ask the dumb question of why baseball has so few schollies? Title 9?

And if it?s that is it because of football high scholly numbers?

Title IX and the small schools support the small number of scholarships. Places like St. Joseph's don't want to have to spend money to compete in baseball and are fine with things as they are.

Baseball needs to break into divisions like college football where it's I-A and I-AA. It's not fair to the schools that want to compete and place an emphasis on baseball to not be allowed to do so because St. Mary's School for Nuns doesn't want to spend money on baseball.

[Todd4State]

The dead periods would benefit us when we go to Omaha.

I know that a lot of people don't like college baseball offering kids in junior high but for MSU at least we honor those commitments. The ones we've lost are usually because they de-committed because we lose an assistant coach. Of course we haven't offered a player in junior high that still wasn't a prospect 4-5 years later.

I like the idea of exhibition games. It's silly that men and women's basketball and softball get to play them but baseball doesn't. If we play Delta State in an exhibition situation I would go to it for sure personally. Last time I went to a MSU/Delta State game a fight almost broke out. Definitely worth the price of admission.

A fourth paid coach would help MSU out as well. It would be nice if we could add someone like Ed Easley to help with our catchers or someone that specializes in baserunning and bunting. We could also bring back Ron Polk. *****

[Quaoarsking]

I haven?t studied it so I?ll ask the dumb question of why baseball has so few schollies? Title 9?

And if it?s that is it because of football high scholly numbers?

That's the excuse, but the real reason is only a few schools have any interest in spending money on baseball.

There would be no legal issue in the NCAA deciding, "OK, now you have can 25 scholarships in baseball, just make sure you still comply with Title 9." Each school could choose between not going all the way to 25 (lots D1 schools don't get to 11.7 as is), taking away men's scholarships in other sports and giving them to baseball, or adding extra women's scholarships at the school's ratio.

[Todd4State]

That's the excuse, but the real reason is only a few schools have any interest in spending money on baseball.

There would be no legal issue in the NCAA deciding, "OK, now you have can 25 scholarships in baseball, just make sure you still comply with Title 9." Each school could choose between not going all the way to 25 (lots D1 schools don't get to 11.7 as is), taking away men's scholarships in other sports and giving them to baseball, or adding extra women's scholarships at the school's ratio.

That's actually a great point- adding baseball scholarships would then cause more scholarships for women which would give even more people a chance to get a scholarship.

[AusTexDawg]

Baseball needs to break into divisions like college football where it's I-A and I-AA. It's not fair to the schools that want to compete and place an emphasis on baseball to not be allowed to do so because St. Mary's School for Nuns doesn't want to spend money on baseball.

This^. There is a wide gap in the level of commitment and/or financial wherewithal between a school like UL-Lafayette or Long Beach State compared to Alcorn State or Davidson, and that's without mentioning schools like MSU, LSU or Arkansas, or even the UNCs or Virginias of the world.

[MStateDawg]

This^. There is a wide gap in the level of commitment and/or financial wherewithal between a school like UL-Lafayette or Long Beach State compared to Alcorn State or Davidson, and that's without mentioning schools like MSU, LSU or Arkansas, or even the UNCs or Virginias of the world.

These gaps exist in virtually all sports and the NCAA should create more divisions to balance the power and give student athletes more reasonable chances to win titles.

Examples:
Basketball- Mississippi Valley State University competes for the same national title in basketball as the University of Kentucky. In what world can a reasonable person even pretend those are programs of the same caliber?
Football- Eastern Michigan University competes for the the same national title in football as the University of Alabama. Again, nowhere near peers.
Baseball- St. Peter's University competes for the same national title as the University of Texas. In no way are these programs remotely on par.
etc
etc
etc