When it comes to the NCAA outdoor season, there’s plenty to love. The national championships are awesome. Most conference championships are awesome, especially when team titles come down to the 4x400m. Heck, even a few of the mid-season regular meets—Payton Jordan and Penn Relays come to mind—can hold their own on the entertainment scale.

However, the two regional meets sandwiched in between conference weekend and NCAAs are… not awesome.

The NCAA East and West Regionals …or preliminary rounds, or first rounds, or qualifiers, or whatever you call it… are treated by pretty much everyone like a necessary evil to muscle through.

Regionals are a pair of enormous four-day meets full of all the biggest collegiate stars who have to show up and compete. In theory it should be the second-most exciting meet on the whole collegiate schedule. But instead, the whole shebang basically boils down to “play it safe, don’t mess up, and finish top 12.”

For the athletes at the top of the list, there’s nowhere to go but down. For the athletes rising up from the lower ranks, qualifying for NCAAs is a thrill, but you’re ultimately just earning the honor of getting bounced in the first round come June. And for the bottom third of the fields, while qualifying for Regionals is a nice accomplishment, you probably already picked up a point or two at your conference meet, which likely matters more to you and your teammates.

The 10,000ms are particularly farcical. With only one heat in each region and no need to even glance at the clock, the whole affair morphs into a long, boring tempo workout where the only goal is to finish in the top 25 percent of the field. It almost never yields surprise non-qualifiers. It’s everything we hate about tedious championship round-running with none of the payoff. That’s all saved for the championship itself—which has its own rounds of qualifying for most events anyway.

And yet, we shouldn’t take it for granted that regional meets are boring. Cross country regionals are thrilling rides, with teams battling for the few auto spots then anxiously awaiting results from around the country to see how at-large points shake out. NCAA tournaments in other sports—most notably basketball but also football, baseball, softball, and others—include multiple rounds of exciting action that are worth watching before the real big championship rolls around. So how do we fix ours?

In short, something about Regionals has to mean something. Turning the whole meet into a qualified/not qualified binary makes it so that the only exciting outcomes happen somewhere between 11th and 13th place, while the stars are incentivized to do the absolute bare minimum. Teams (and the athletes that comprise them) need something else to run, jump, and throw for.

Unlike NCAAs and conference meets, there isn’t a team scoring element to the preliminary meet. On one hand, who cares? Teams still want to get athletes to nationals for the scoring potential they offer there. But on the other, you again run into the problem where the really good teams have no reason to do anything beyond the bare minimum to advance, not the maximum their talent and roster allows.

The first piece of the solution is easy: turn two regional meets into four. The “Final Four” branding of basketball is nearly as iconic as the NCAA itself, so why not borrow a nifty turn of phrase and the cache it provides? At cocktail parties in 15 years, 10k runners can say they “made the Final Four” in college and the only giveaway will be the fact that they’re 5’8” and still have a pronounced watch tan line.

More seriously, this tweak allows the selection process to remain the same, numerically, while encouraging more competitive performances, cutoff-wise. Instead of 48 athletes vying for 12 spots, you’ve got 24 athletes per event going for a mere six big-Qs. That leaves a lot less margin of error for sprinters shutting it down at 80 meters or jumpers retiring after four attempts, and a kicker’s race in the 5000m or 10,000m could easily turn into a bloodbath. It’ll keep the top guys on their toes and force them to go for broke, or risk allowing exciting upsets to occur at their expense.

But that’s just the start. Here at TLC, we’re increasingly seeing the value in the liberal and strategic use of wild cards. Track and field’s historic love for its meritocratic selection processes, while important in some contexts, can also be a weakness when the goal is drama. So here’s a tantalizing offer for the teams contending for every point at NCAAs: win your Regional, and you’ll be mightily rewarded. In addition to the prestige of beating all the other Northeast, South, Central, and West Regional schools, the team champion will be awarded one wild card entry into an open event and one in a relay of its choosing. You already qualified both a 4x1 and a 4x4? No problem—now you get a B team. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which the Arkansases or Floridas of the world could put two relays in the top eight and make a big difference in the national meet scoring.

The individual wild card could go to a talented, but fragile, athlete who got healthy late but didn’t have time to get a qualifier, or it could allow for ballsier doubles if your best 200m/400m or 1500m/5000m runner doesn’t have to run both events at both meets. “But, but, but— fairness!” teams will cry. In this instance, we’re willing to sacrifice a little fairness for a lot of intrigue.

Our other “run hard at Regionals” gimmick is similar in that it’s designed more to reward the top athletes for trying than the underdogs for overperforming. In events with both heats and finals at NCAAs (100m–1500m, both hurdles, and the steeple), the Regional winner should get an automatic spot in the national final. The top four athletes in the national final will all be extra rested, so it doesn’t create a totally lopsided system favoring one athlete, but in order to do so, they’ll have to give 100% or close to it two weeks earlier. Since few, if any, collegiate athletes are so good they can win a regional meet outright with a restrained effort, it’ll essentially require all the athletes who normally coast to run through the line in pursuit of that sweet, sweet bye.

There you have it: a three-step fix that’s deeply undemocratic, but potentially highly effective at increasing the number of exciting NCAA postseason weekends by 50%. Defenders of the status quo will hate it, but fans of quality racing will love it. And now track and field has a Final Four weekend to contend with every major sport. Let’s give it a shot.

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