Alternative GAA Season Structure: The McNamee System

[del_carroll]

... Also think that the provincial championships winner gets a place in the top 16... To allow for your Clare or sligo&aqs outliers.. In practice, this should not be an issue as it's rare enough a team from outside the effective top 16 win one, only arises every 5 years or so in Connacht.. Every 10 years elsewhere...

[del_carroll]

Actually where would we be this season by this ranking. Would kildares win over Laois have been enough to rescue our season? At the expense of Laois perhaps?

[bcarrier]

Havent read all 11 pages but I like it a lot.

Any merit in a limited play off for the teams ranked 13-20

13   Down (D2)   14 vs 20   Fermanagh (D3)   10.5
14   Clare (D4)   13 vs 19   Wexford (D3)   11
15   Tipperary (D4)   13 vs 18   Armagh (D2)   12
16   Kildare (D1)   12 vs  17   Laois (D2)   12

could potentially keep more teams interested in league for longer.
     

[BennyHarp]

Ball hopper and Benny - ye're proposals would be blown out of the congress waters if it ever got that far.
The weaker Counties won't agree to being excluded.

Yeah, you're right but for any change to happen we are going to have to see a change in mindset. Our whole club structure is based on the senior, intermediate and junior system and teams work happily within in. Unless something drastic happens to funding and population levels then we will always have a system that is unfair at county level if we throw everyone into the same championship. How can we divide teams in a league then decide they are fit to compete on an even playing field a few months later? Linking the league to the championship is not excluding the weaker counties, (I'm all for a championship for the bottom 16 counties played as certain risers to senior games) it does however give a county that is serious about progressing a route to play for Sam, get promotion and you will make the top 16. Surely it's better if a team in div 4 works its way up through the ranks and shows development (like Tipperary maybe) and when they make the last 16 they are better equipped to deal with it than throwing Longford in with Dublin, even though they ply their trade way below them in the league. We need to see the league element, not as a seperate league but as an All Ireland qualifier and part of the championship process. Anyway, how many div 3 and 4 teams are likely to make the last 16 in ANY format?

[Captain Obvious]

Plenty of hammerings in Hurling this summer both live games today very one sided and some reckon football should copy the hurling format?

[twohands!!!]

Plenty of hammerings in Hurling this summer both live games today very one sided and some reckon football should copy the hurling format?

Imagine what an utter state of disaster hurling would be in if hurling didn't have the structure it does have.
What sort of crowds and what amount of hammerings there would be if the traditional provincial championships still existed in hurling and you had a lot less of the top teams playing each other?

When the qualifiers came in some of the weaker counties seemed to think it would magically improve their teams.

The structure of competitions isn't a magic fix that's going to improve a team's skills overnight but it can reduce the number of predicable dull games, where you can pick the winner with ease before throw-in a significant amount of time and the best a significant chunk of the teams competing can hope for is the moral victory of pulling off a shock.

The fact is that for a significant chunk of teams, the amount of football they will play in the summer depends hugely on what sort of draw they get.

[Captain Obvious]

In football it seems only the top six Dublin,Kerry,Cork,Donegal,Mayo,Monaghan only lose when facing off against each other and don't suffer shocks any more, is the league format the reason for creating this gap i'd wonder. As for the rest on the day the so called higher ranked teams can lose to promoted division three or mid table division three teams.

[BennyHarp]

So Joe is backing Jimmy on this one. This is going to happen people......

http://gaeliclife.com/2015/06/joe-brolly-stop-the-whales-from-eating-the-plankton/

[muppet]

So Joe is backing Jimmy on this one. This is going to happen people......

http://gaeliclife.com/2015/06/joe-brolly-stop-the-whales-from-eating-the-plankton/

This is interesting but I just hate justifying everything on this statement:

Worst of all, the weaker teams in the country disappear speedily, usually having played just one championship match and one qualifier. -

Worst of all?

Let's face it, the stronger teams are unlikely to disappear after those two games. If they did they wouldn't be considered, um, 'stronger'.

But by and large I do agree with the direction McGuinness is going with this.

[twohands!!!]

Article covering the state of things in Waterford football

Posted it in this thread as I think it's very relevant to the state of the game in the bottom tier football counties and how an alternative GAA season might possibly help them. A key problem for the bottom tier team is getting all of their best footballers to commit. When your playing resources are so limited missing out on even a few lads can have a huge impact.

I think lads in the bottom tier counties would be far more inclined to line out for their county if they knew that the odds of getting an almighty hammering were reduced significantly and there was an actual prize that was

It wouldnt be a quick fix and you wouldn't have Waterford competing for Sam but it would at least be something for the footballers in teh county to work with.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/gaa/football/after-the-winter-sun-the-summer-chill-for-waterford-338277.html

[Keyser soze]

Here why don't we have a 32 tier championship so that all the lads that have been bustin their hole all winter get a medal.

Somebody needs to stand up for these weaker counties. Why should the good teams win all the f****** games, the whole system is so completely biased against the bad teams. Every f***** year.....same oul s**** ....the best team wins the all-ireland and all the good treams are getting to semi-finals and shite like that. It's just not fair!!!

[deiseach]

An instructive article. Given the uproar a few years when the impact of the changes to the qualifiers with the Tommy Murphy Cup dawned on people, I'm sceptical that offering a second tier competition to the Waterford footballers will somehow energise those playing the game in the county to give more commitment. There was a piece in the Sindo a few years back by John O'Brien that pretty well summed up my attitude to the whole situation:

Don't knock the back door -- it's the best system we have
The qualifiers free weaker counties from provincial shackles, says John O'Brien

PUBLISHED
19/06/2011

It could be argued that the most electrifying moment of this year's All-Ireland football championship thus far came in Carrick-on-Shannon last Sunday when Mickey Quinn and Paddy McNaughton dipped their fingers into a linen sack and, one after the other, pulled out the names of Louth and Meath. A leaden summer dominated by the usual hysterical talk about declining skills and bad officiating had suddenly spat out a fixture worth getting worked up about.

It was a shot in the arm for the qualifier system, ten years old this summer, still unloved by many, only grudgingly accepted by the majority. Yet it threw up something the rigidly structured provincial championships could not: an unexpected gem that harked back to unfinished business from last year. A grudge match. It mightn't live up to the hype, of course, but the hype itself is something. God knows, the championship can do with every bit it can muster.

Not that it will salvage the qualifiers from the lowly position they occupy in people's affections. Any day now a giant is going to be toppled -- a Kerry or Cork or Tyrone -- and the inevitable cliché will ring out: "Sure the All-Ireland only begins in August anyway." The provincial championships, it is argued, have been irreparably devalued while the qualifiers are little more than a month-long accounting period from which the best teams will filter through for the real business of summer.

Such sentiments are fair enough, but a problem arises when the temptation becomes too strong to lump all the ills of the championship structure at the door of the qualifiers which weren't devised as a panacea in the first place. What they were was a heavily watered down version of the proposals put forward by the now defunct Football Development Committee in 1999. Instead of a wildly ambitious scheme to guarantee every county a minimum of 10 games came the tepid compromise of a second chance. A GAA solution to a GAA problem.

Whenever these debates surface, we might usefully wonder whether we are asking the right questions anyway. All the fanciful talk of intricate round-robin systems, Champions League variations or shifting provincial boundaries merely underscores the reality that the system is an ass to begin with. The thing is it has more than a century behind it and isn't for turning in any meaningful way. For better or worse we're largely stuck with it.

Those who decry the qualifier system do so largely on the grounds that is has diluted the do-or-die nature of provincial games and compromised the sanctity of the championship. Michael Delaney, chief executive of the Leinster Council, has long been an ardent critic of the qualifiers and the feeling persists that the hankering for the traditional knockout format is stronger than most of us would bargain for.

And that's the thing. Before you start talking about fancy new systems, you need to figure out how radical you're willing to be. What is the point, for instance, of talking about more elaborate structures without a mind for the demands it would place on amateur players? If amateurism is a sine qua non going forward, forget notions of extending the present format. And if we accept that clubs are the bedrock of the GAA, then it could be argued that the All-Ireland championship is already big enough for its boots.

As for the qualifiers themselves, criticism tends to centre around two issues in particular. The first is that they are weighted strongly in favour of the most successful counties, a familiar refrain when the GAA introduces any innovation. To which there is really only one appropriate response: well, lordy. A championship stretched out over five months that culminates, more often than not, with the two best teams in the country fighting for silverware in Croke Park. By definition should a championship be designed to do anything else?

Those who have trouble with that might be better off coming up with fresh ideas. A handicap system as used in horse racing, perhaps. The best players carrying lead weights in their shorts or, if that is too uncomfortable, maybe the Gooch could play blindfolded or the Cork midfield forced to play with their bootlaces tied together. Leitrim could select their entire stock of able-bodied men under the age of 35, allowing them to field 20 players instead of 15.

Or maybe you could leave the qualifiers out of it and focus on the real problem. The GAA investing in weaker counties, particularly at schools and underage level, helping them to close the gap with the top teams.

The real value of Mick O'Dwyer's presence in Wicklow, for example, wasn't any quick-fix notion the great man brought, but the impetus he provided the county board to get busy on the ground where the real hard work needed to be done.

The impetus is the thing. It was a credit to Wicklow that they realised their thrilling run through the 2009 qualifiers wasn't an elixir in itself for years of neglect and poor results, but something to build on that would take time and a lot of energy. There isn't a system alive that can compensate for hard work and dedication. The qualifiers can provide an impetus that, for various reasons, hasn't always come from the provincial championships. It is up to the counties themselves how they use it.

The other major issue is the apparent iniquity of provincial winners being denied a second chance and the dismal record of provincial finalists in the final qualifying round. Is it harsh, as Mickey Harte has argued, that provincial winners exit the championship after their first defeat? Perhaps. Yet is there nothing to be said for the momentum and confidence a team accumulates during an unbeaten run through the province?

And more importantly, they will enjoy the privilege of an extended break while their opponents are often coming off the back of a hard game the previous week. That's a pretty sizeable advantage in our book.

The defeated provincial finalists have a stronger case. Yet the fault here lies with the needlessly elongated nature of the provincial championships. It has nothing to do with the qualifiers per se. The statistics show that of the 40 fourth-round qualifiers played to date, only 15 provincial finalists have advanced. That's a win rate of less than 40 per cent. On the surface that appears alarming but there is a reasonably satisfactory explanation.

Take, for example, the oft-cited three years when none of the beaten provincial finalists managed to win: 2003, 2004 and 2010. If you examine each contest individually none of them, with the exception of Fermanagh beating Mayo in 2004, could be legitimately regarded as shocks. The favourites held sway almost every time. Back to an earlier point: the strong teams getting stronger as the summer wears on. That's championship football for you. And maybe it suggests too that the best teams don't always contest provincial finals.

There's a bottom-line argument in all of this. You could tweak the system in as many ways as you like and the structural faults would just manifest themselves in other ways. And, as now, the system would still bear the brunt of the blame. The best course of action is simply to enjoy what is there and stop hankering for idealistic solutions that don't exist. The championship started with a whimper in Ballybofey last month. It comes alive in Breffni Park next Saturday.

Ah, July approaching. Mid-summer and not a single county out of the All-Ireland yet. The games coming thick and fast. The tantalising prospect of a minnow suddenly getting a hint of form and putting a few wins together back to back. New heroes, fresh narratives. Just think how great the qualifiers could be if we only learned how to love them.

[Dinny Breen]

Laois had played 4 Championship games and were knocked out before Sligo had kicked a ball in anger. 

[AZOffaly]

Laois had played 4 Championship games and were knocked out before Sligo had kicked a ball in anger. 

I think that's the real issue. Scheduling is crazy. The Connacht Championship features 7 teams and runs from May 3rd to July 19th. Given that there isn't even a Connacht Hurling Championship, how is that allowed?

[BennyHarp]

Here why don't we have a 32 tier championship so that all the lads that have been bustin their hole all winter get a medal.

Somebody needs to stand up for these weaker counties. Why should the good teams win all the f****** games, the whole system is so completely biased against the bad teams. Every f***** year.....same oul s**** ....the best team wins the all-ireland and all the good treams are getting to semi-finals and shite like that. It's just not fair!!!

So, putting your bizarrely aggressive post to one side - seriously, what do you suggest?