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1. AUDL Weekend Results
Week 3 is in the books for the AUDL, and the Toronto Rush have emerged as the team to beat in the league with the Windy City Wildfire right behind them. Both teams easily dispatched their two opponents this past weekend, and both sit atop their conference with room to spare as well. The Madison Radicals are also putting up strong results with a close win over the Minnesota Wind Chill, and the DC Breeze got their first win of the season of a college championships depleted Rochester Dragons squad.
Let me also add that score updates via Twitter without some sort of reference to the time left on the game clock is the most annoying thing in the world. I’m trying to follow the action, and when a tweet goes out that it’s a tie game with limited time left, I want to know how much time. Yes, this paragraph is directly at the Rochester Dragons, who will hopefully see this. When a player is in my car on the way back from regionals and resorts to following other twitter accounts to get the score of their team’s game, someone isn’t doing something right.
2. MLU Weekend Results
Once again a really close week in the MLU, and two teams played two games (Nighthawks and Stags) leaving them at the bottom of their conference. Over in the Eastern Conference, the Whitecaps and Spinners are undefeated while the Current and Rumble are winless. While I’m excited to see the two on the top, and two on the bottom meet each other in play, if they keep playing other teams (Whitecaps play the Rumble this weekend) they could be too far out of reach at the top or bottom come playoff time. Scores have remained very close in the conference as well, with 6 goals for separating the Whitecaps and Rumble. Over in the Western Conference, the teams are still pretty close. The Stags have a high goal differential, on the negative side, and even with one more game played than the Dogfish and Rainmakers that’s not good news. If they don’t start scoring more soon, they’ll find themselves out of it. We do get to see the two undefeated teams (Rainmakers and Dogfish) battle this weekend.
At first, the way the MLU set up its schedule page was fine, but lately I’ve been getting frustrated with its lack of clarity. I just want to see when the teams play. Something similar to what the NHL does would probably look great, because they could still highlight the home team, and the team logos, but also include where I can find it online, media, etc. which they could use some more promotion anyway.
3. Final Callahan Nominee & New Video
The final Skyd 5 Callahan nominee from Skyd Magazine was announced to be Will Driscoll. Definitely a deserving player, he’s shown to be a baller on both sides of the disc ever since NexGen last summer. With Texas Tuff taking down Mamabird for the regional title for the first time in forever, his star status definitely went up another notch. Speaking of Callahan, there is a new video the fray, the Hodags Brian Hart. Some nice tunes, and a great Settlers scene (oh and some highlights) put this as one of the best ones out yet.
4. What’s Up Ultimate
You’ve most likely already seen this, but it’s pretty awesome that ESPN posted a welcome message for ultimate fans, and name dropped a few teams. Just keep watching it on repeat, getting me pretty excited for the championships.
5. Regionals Results
First weekend of regionals are down the drain, make sure you check the results on the Open and Women’s side. Judging from the D3 results so far, it’s looking to shape up to be a pretty competitive tournament (in both divisions too). Once the fields are set I’ll take a more in depth look at the teams competing, but for now make sure to stay on top of who’s in.
6. Building Pro Ultimate
An interesting and well written look from SBNation’s ‘Land-Grant Holy Land’ (an Ohio State blog) on building pro ultimate from the ground up. It takes a good look at what the sport has done so far, and what sets the AUDL apart from the college game. Not only a good perspective for people outside of the sport, but also for people already entrenched in the sport – writing for the other perspective can help expose some flaws and faults.
7. 7 Game Series
If you don’t know, I’m a big hockey fan. The New York Rangers are my team, but if there’s any hockey on I will watch it. If you also didn’t know, it’s playoff time now. I’ve talked before about what if the NCAA tournament was done in college ultimate, and how awesome that’d be, now I’m thinking about a 16 team tournament (re-seeded after each round) decided with a best-of-seven game series (mostly because last night there were two overtime games… on the first night of the playoffs… so awesome).
I’m thinking about this taking place in USAU club ultimate more than anything else, I think the parity would be most viable there and such an intense format would play well with the higher talent level. That would mean though that time (and more importantly – overtime) would be eliminated in favor of playing to points. 17 point games that are hard-capped after two hours would be sufficient though. No way should the games of each series be played out among one or two tournament days, instead try playing them out along a week – leaving about a month for the entire championship to be decided or you could go two months with extended breaks in between games and if you were doing the travel between home cities. The breaks would be easy to throw in, especially if in this dream world the players had no outside job and traveling between cities could create an awesome atmosphere in the later rounds for sure.
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Going off of the 16 teams that were in Sarasota last fall, I think a split into a Western and Eastern conference is pretty easy – though maybe you have to lose the Sub Zero/Madison Club rivalry.
Feature photo by Marshall Goff – Ultiphotos.com
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