Myles Brand who served as the NCAA President since 2003 passed away from Pancreatic cancer on Wednesday. He was diagnosed in January and fought the disease with great effort but sadly passed away yesterday. He will be known nationally for firing legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight when Brand was the President of Indiana. Knight choked one of his players during a practice which led to the firing. On the baseball side of things was a key component in keeping the NCAA baseball season at it’s current 56 game limit but currently we don’t know what the new president of the NCAA will do during their tenure.

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I reported on January 6th that West Virginia head coach Greg Van Zant made a proposal for a change to the RPI. (FULL STORY) It was discussed at the ABCA convention and recently was sent off to the NCAA Division 1 Baseball Committee where it will be reviewed again. Read the rest of this entry »

The NCAA has announced that they are placing a moratorium for composite bats according to a report from Baseball America’s Aaron Fitt (LINK). The issue about the composite bats aroused during the Tennessee and Vanderbilt season ending series where multiple homers by the Volunteers were hit over the wall at ridiculous distances. Tim Corbin was adamant that Tennessee was using hot bats to hit those homers including getting a bat confiscated. The SEC Tournament Conference Call which took place after that series focused on the issue.

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The College Baseball Blog will be providing roundtable discussions during the season on some of the big issues around college baseball. We invited Swarthmore Assistant Coach Jordan Wyckoff to join our writers to discuss some of the rule changes for the 2009 NCAA season. Some of the changes are minor and others focus on the safety of the players and on the field personnel. We will also see a few changes in the amount of conferences each team is allowed on offense and defense. We comment on a bunch of the changes below. Read the rest of this entry »

Texas A&M University athletic director Bill Byrne writes a weekly newsletter to fans addressing the state of the athletic program, fan questions and concerns, and NCAA issues. In this week’s newsletter Byrne addressed a memo received from the NCAA regarding concerns of travel costs to various NCAA Championships. College baseball could be one of the main sports greatly impacted by any potential rule changes to address this concern. Byrne had the following to say on the subject: Read the rest of this entry »

The official NCAA Blog has put out a great post about some of the potential rule changes around College Baseball for next season. The biggest change is the fact that they will require base coaches to wear a helmet next season following the lead of Major League Baseball after the unfortunate death of a minor league coach in 2007. One of the other rule changes deal with speeding up the game with less conferences with umpires and on the mound. The final rule change is to eliminate all the huddling around home plate by a team after a home run or doing live play where teammates will come out of the dugout. I actually saw this happen last season during a Division 2 matchup between Franklin Pierce and Assumption. The Franklin Pierce benched emptied to congratulate the running scoring but the ball ended up getting away from the infield and going into the middle of the players coming onto the field. We were able to secure video of Jim Paronto talking about the rule changes. Read the rest of this entry »

FROM CBB NEWS SOURCE

The NCAA baseball committee sat down and discuss some changes to some rules to help speed up the game and for safety purposes.

• enforcing time limits (a pitch must be delivered within 20 seconds with no runners on base)

• the batter’s box rule (the batter must generally keep one foot in the box during an at-bat)
• handling of conferences (defensive and offensive)

• speeding the time between innings and during pitching changes were areas the committee identified as areas of possible improvement

• This season, all base coaches are required to wear a helmet when coaching the bases.

• The committee also believes that, in some cases, fields are not being lined properly before play begins.

To read the rest of the Article about the NCAA BASEBALL COMMITTEE

The original link is working now.