It doesn’t exactly rate with the invention of the air conditioner or the guy who came up with the automatic teller machine, but let’s give it up and put our hands together for whoever came up with the concept of the college baseball Super Regional.

Once upon a time (the 1980s and 1990s), the NCAA Baseball Tournament opened with this strange amalgam of six-team regionals in which nobody could figure out who was going to play whom next. To make matters worse, there were a few years in which some regionals had four teams and some had six.

But then the six-team regional just got to be too unmanageable. Especially when one was in Baton Rouge, where it seems as though every late spring afternoon is punctuated with a driving rainstorm, screwing up an already screwed up schedule even more.

Finally, someone who deserved a little something extra in their check came up with the idea that we have today – 16 regionals of four teams each in a double elimination format and then the winners get to tee it up in a what-baseball-is-all-about best-of-three series.

To borrow a catchphrase famed Astros broadcaster Loel Passe … Now you chunkin’ in there!

The switch to Super Regionals came in 1999 and it’s made things some much easier to understand and simpler to watch. In 2001, the highlight of the Super Regionals was an LSU-Tulane confrontation that captivated the entire state as the two battled it out in a series that lasted for all three games.

The balance of power has shifted somewhat over the years – there aren’t as many good teams out West as there used to be – but the format has allowed for the magic of college baseball to still be magical.

You still get a Kent State or a Stony Brook to make its way to Omaha. For that matter, there is still a path for Coastal Carolina (2016) or Fresno State (2008) to win a national championship, which will never happen in football.

So after decades of ever-changing regional brackets, the last 25 years have been wrapped up in a nice tidy package.

Which can mean only one thing: Maybe it’s time to look at making a change.

Sounds crazy, but there is a potential format change out there that actually does make a little bit more sense. I’d love to say that I came up with it, but Texas A&M Coach Jim Schlossnagle beat me to it.

Here’s a quick primer:

** There would still be 64 teams make the tournament.

** Instead of a weekend with a four-team regional, followed by a two-team Super Regional, it would just be nothing but best-of-three weekends, starting with 32 host sites, then 16, then eight. Every weekend would be a Super Regional-style format.

** This would take three weekends instead of two, so you would either have to lengthen the season by a week at the end or shorten the season at the beginning or (blasphemy alert!) get rid of the conference tournament.

** When you get down to the final eight, see you in Omaha. No change there.

Despite leaving me out of the proposal, Schlossnagle has some great points (if I may be so bold as to speak for him).

1. There would 32 locations hosting that first weekend. That’s called growing the game. The home team is always going to be playing, instead of having half the games in which it’s just friends and families and thousands of empty seats.
2. This would be more in line with the schedule teams currently play during the regular season.
3. LSU was one of several schools that played five games in 72 hours last weekend. That’s what happens in beer league weekend softball tournaments. It shouldn’t happen for teams trying to advance to the next round.
4. You also avoid the awkwardness of having the host team having to be the visitors in their own park, as Schlossnagle’s team was in two of its three games last weekend. If you’re hosting, you are the home team.

Ask yourself this: Would you be willing to give up a weekend in early February – not exactly beach weather – against a mid-major school from the north that you’ve never heard of in exchange for basically three Super Regional weekends in May/June?

Of course you would.

(Now, why didn’t I think of all of this first?)

Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com