forty day practice rule

[xubrew]

midnight madness is great. well, actually, i don't think that it is. it isn't even the official start of practice anymore. it has now merely become the first friday night after practice officially begins. the reason they do it on friday is because they don't want the fans, coaches and players to be up well past midnight on a week night. even that would make some sense...if they still did it at midnight, but most of them start earlier now.

so, what midnight madness has become is a practice that takes place after practice has officially started (so you really can't call it the official kickoff to the season), and since it doesn't even take place at midnight, you can't call it "midnight' madness.

the new rule for the women is that they're allowed to begin practice forty days before their first official game. i think that is a great rule. early in the season, you get so many big games in the early season tournaments and what-not, but the teams aren't at 100% because they are still getting used to each other. from a fan perspective, the quality of basketball suffers. another thing we see is that just about every team schedules two or three buy games as a tune-up so they can get more time to gel before playing in a big game. well, with a little more practice, maybe that wouldn't be as necessary, and we wouldn't have so many uninteresting games in the month of november. teams only get 29 games for their season. it sucks that they're wasting two or three of them getting used to each other because practice starts less than three weeks before the games do in some cases.

so, for once, the ncaa had a really good idea, which is kind of surprising. however, they kind of screwed it up because they only implemented it for women's basketball, which really isn't surprising. men's basketball is still under the same, old rules. that makes no sense at all, but because we're talking about the ncaa, it actually makes perfect sense.

i hate mondays...

[GoMuskies]

so, for once, the ncaa had a really good idea, which is kind of surprising. however, they kind of screwed it up because they only implemented it for women's basketball, which really isn't surprising. men's basketball is still under the same, old rules. that makes no sense at all, but because we're talking about the ncaa, it actually makes perfect sense.


Makes sense to me. Try it out in the lab (women's basketball) where exponentially fewer people will notice or care. If the new rule works as expected, you implement the same rule for the men. If there are any unexpected kinks to be worked out or refinements to be made, you figure that out before you make the rule a part of the men's game. Makes perfect sense to me.

(And I mean no disrespect to the women here. It's simply obvious that less people follow/are interested in women's basketball, so changes on that side are much more likely to be under the radar.)

[xubrew]

Makes sense to me. Try it out in the lab (women's basketball) where exponentially fewer people will notice or care. If the new rule works as expected, you implement the same rule for the men. If there are any unexpected kinks to be worked out or refinements to be made, you figure that out before you make the rule a part of the men's game. Makes perfect sense to me.

(And I mean no disrespect to the women here. It's simply obvious that less people follow/are interested in women's basketball, so changes on that side are much more likely to be under the radar.)

i don't believe that is their reasoning. however, the only reason i don't think it's their reasoning is because it actually demonstrates an ability to reason.

i'm half kidding, but i'm only HALF kidding...

it's just that it appears as though men's basketball pushed for this change (at least that's what it looks like to me)...and when it was changed, they only implemented it toward the women's game, who wasn't really advocating for it as strongly. now that they have it, every women's coach and player seems to think that it is great and that it will make a difference in early season games. meanwhile, their male counterparts are kind of throwing their hands in the air wondering 'wtf??'

[surfxu]

...we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice man. We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We're not talking about the game. We're talking about practice. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you've seen me play right, you've seen me give everything I've got, but we're talking about practice right now. - Allen Iverson

[X-band '01]

Even then, we're only talking about the beginning of TEAM practice. Coaches are still permitted to have individual workouts in groups of 2 or 3 per NCAA rules.