The Florida Gators men’s track team, won the outdoor national championship again in 2023. If you’ve been keeping score at home that is 6 championships since 2012. One might think that their dominance is something new in college track and field, but dynasties are actually what we’ve grown accustomed to. Florida won 6 out of 11 but never completed a three peat, and before them it was Texas A&M who won three straight in a row. Before Texas A&M it was Florida State who had their own three peat, and, three years before that Arkansas did the same thing, winning three straight. College track and field is so predictable that we might as well be watching a fast and furious movie. That’s because the scoring system for NCAA track and field is entirely broken. The only way to fix it is to change it. Otherwise, at the rate we’re going the National championship meet might as well become a second chance do over for the SEC conference.

The Conference Championship meet system works

Track and Field is so broken that most people don’t even know where things went wrong. The Florida Gators are a national powerhouse on the men’s and women’s sides. While the men were winning a championship in 2023, the women finished second. That is only a disappoint because the women won the NCAA championship just a year ago in 2022. However to call the men or women of Florida a national powerhouse is pretty misleading, because neither team won their conference championship. In fact, the men of Florida didn’t even finish in the top 5 of the SEC, and the team that won it all did so emphatically with 149 points to their 70. Yet Florida won the NCAAs as 1 of 5 men’s teams, and 6 women’s teams from the SEC in the top 10 of the nation. This is only possible because the scoring system for track changes itself up from meet to meet.

College track has always been a team sport, where every NCAA program is a part of a conference, just like football and basketball. That means that they compete for a conference championship. That full weekend competition occurs every year for indoor and outdoor as a contest of about 19 individual events, not including the decathlon, or the relays. Teams compete to score points across all those events, and the team with the most wins the conference crown. So college coaches have to recruit a full roster and then select the best 32 athletes off that team who, they believe can score points at the conference meet. This is the real reason why track is a team sport. Every meet up until conference during the regular season, like the Florida Relays, Texas Relays, Larry Ellis Invitational, or whatever else you want to call them, are just tune up meets. In fact most of those meets aren’t even scored for many colleges. They just become opportunities for athletes to practice competing and get seed times before the conference. As a former D1 sprinter, I believe running in a conference championship meet, at the college level, and competing to score points is the most fun you will ever have in track and field. The only problem is that this scoring system only exists at the conference meet, and nowhere else.

Imagine a football coach planning for a season where the amount of points awarded for running touchdowns, passing touchdowns, and even field goals changes from week to week? At that point a coach would have to be more concerned with how national championship games will be scored, and plan their season around that. Florida can win a national championship in track by basically hacking the system. They know that to win nationals you need to have “national qualifying athletes”. The NCAA championship is not a team championship at all, its just the top 24 individual performers across the entire NCAA duking it out in one meet. However, if Florida has several of the men or women, who will go top 8 in the entire nation, those athletes will score points at nationals. What matters is that Florida gets to leave 80 percent of their roster at home when they go to the NCAAs, and teams that beat them in their conference might only have 1 or 2 national qualifiers. The coaches for every team that finished in the top 5 at NCAAs are very aware, that the best thing they can do in recruiting is get one athlete who is basically Olympic caliber. They would much rather do this instead of recruiting 5 state champions, because that 1 kid will actually qualify for nationals, and beat everyone else. This is why there are no upsets in track and field, because we don’t even let teams face off, event for event, to see who actually has the best team! If we want to do the NCAA championship meet like this, that’s fine, but let’s call it what it actually is, an individual NCAA championship meet.

The NCAA already has regions, we just don’t use them

The only way to fix the NCAA championship meet is to redo the qualifying standards to actually invite teams, rather than individual athletes. The funny thing is we have everything we would need to actually do it for college track. March Madness is the greatest event in college sports because it allows teams from around the country to compete, 5 on 5 in basketball to determine a champion, eliminating teams along the way. They invite 68 teams, and knock each other out along the way. Just do the same thing in track and field, with a few adjustments.

If we actually want the best teams, we can select them pretty easily, the NCAA already has regional rankings for 9 regions across the nation. Most people didn’t even know, because we literally don’t use those rankings for anything other than bragging rights. They qualify you for nothing. Those rankings face the schools off based on season performances across the national event list. Florida’s men closed the regular season ranked second in the NCAA’s South region, behind Tennessee who went third at the SEC conference meet. Which makes sense, because the 2 teams they lost to were ranked first and third, but in an entirely different region, that’s Arkansas and LSU from the South Central. 

What a true NCAA team title should look like

To win a team title at the National meet, you should have to survive three rounds to get there. The current system that we use is a bootleg individual championship anyway with two rounds, so honestly it is just one more meet. The first round is a regional round where every team that won a conference championship, all 30 of them get an automatic bid. It’s the same thing they do in basketball, and FCS football for that matter. Using this system, of the teams who finished in the top 10 for 2023, only Arkansas and Washington on the men’s side would have gotten an at large bid to the first round. With a team like Arizona State who finished 7th at their conference championship and 7th in their region in danger of missing out entirely, putting them on the bubble. Just like march madness. All the other teams are at large bids based off of however many teams are required to fill out the remaining slots so that 8 teams show up to each regional meet.

If you actually score the regional meets like you would any conference meet, it’s simple from there. Invite the top 4 teams from each region to a national semifinal meet. Split them into two regions, the East and the West. Which is what we already do now. But in this system we are looking for the best teams, so the 36 teams at the semifinals are competing for only 16 spots at the NCAA championships. Top 8 teams from each get to go on the men’s and women’s sides. That would allow us to finally get to see what a real team championship would look like, and all the small schools, might get eliminated anyway, but they at least get a shot to prove themselves, just like they do in basketball. Remember that upsets do actually happen, march madness is proof of that.

The Bottom Line

The Florida Gators are a track and field team, that basically cheated the system by running an Olympic development program, disguised as a college track team. Half of their team’s points to win the NCAA championship came exclusively from the open 400 and 4x400. Those men are good, but I don’t think it’s fair to let a really fast 4x4 qualify you as a top 10 “team” in the nation, by itself. Track and field is a team sport, and coaches around the country are asked to recruit like it is. We know who the best teams are, it’s just that for so long nobody ever asked. Well I’m asking, because competing for a conference championship is the most fun that any athlete ever gets to have in college. There is absolutely no reason that the national title, shouldn’t be just as fun. The fans deserve to see it, because the SEC is not all there is to college track and field, and upsets actually happen. March Madness is proof of that!

KNOW THE GAME. WIN THE GAME.

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