BREAKING: New rule requires staggered starts for NCAA lacrosse games.

Fan complaints about college lacrosse games all sharing a noon start time have been heard loud and clear, and answered. Today, the NCAA has announced a seismic shift in the rules around broadcast times for lacrosse games that should, just like whenever any lacrosse rules are changed, completely solve the targeted problem with no collateral damage to the sport whatsoever. 

The new rule dictates no men’s D1 college lacrosse games can share a start time. Ever. To comply, games will now start every hour on the hour over the course of a weekend. There are 38 games on the schedule this weekend, and the schedule will be played as follows:

On Saturday, April 4:

12am: Merrimack vs Manhattan

1am: Air Force vs Bellarmine

2am: Bucknell vs Army

3am: Albany vs Binghamton

4am: Loyola vs Boston U

5am: Brown vs Harvard

6am: Penn vs Cornell

7am: Denver vs Villanova

8am: Le Moyne vs Detroit Mercy

9am: Hampton vs Drexel

10am: Fairfield vs Hofstra

11am: Georgetown vs Providence

Noon: Maryland vs Ohio State

1pm Hobart vs Delaware

2pm: Navy vs Holy Cross

3pm: Colgate vs Lafayette

4pm: Marist vs Stony Brook

5pm St John’s vs Marquette

6pm: LIU vs Mercyhurst

7pm: Monmouth vs Towson

8pm: NJIT vs Bryant

9pm: Penn State vs Hopkins

10pm: Vermont vs Princeton 

11pm: Jacksonville vs Queens

On Sunday, April 5

12am: Quinnipiac vs Sacred Heart

1am: Richmond vs Notre Dame (in Chicago)

2am: Robert Morris vs VMI

3am: St Bonaventure vs High Point

4am: Saint Joseph’s vs UMass

5am: Siena vs Iona

6am: Syracuse vs North Carolina

7am: UMBC vs UMass Lowell

8am: Mercer vs Utah

9am: Duke vs Virginia

10am: Cleveland State vs Wagner

11am: Dartmouth vs Yale

Noon: Rutgers vs Michigan

The rule does still require Maryland to play at noon, so they will still be on at noon every Saturday. It was not immediately clear why the decision was made to just play every hour on the hour, through the night and morning, when so many hours were left on Sunday. 

The new schedule also represents an opportunity to more broadly stream games. With the varied schedule, and the prospect of airing a 3am NEC game, ESPN is scaling back and focusing more on games played strictly during daylight hours. To accommodate, several new streaming services have launched:

Burner Lacrosse Network - Also known as BLN. Enjoy real time commentary from RBrowny and GGG, along with regular interruptions to games action to put memes on screen during the game. The score will be ignored in favor of “just getting jokes off”. 

The Lacrosse Network Network - The scorebug will have random words in all caps for some reason, and emoji’s will be superimposed all over the screen on big goals. Regular events that happen in the course of play will be elevated to all time moment status because nothing can just happen without it being a big deal. Think the NFL Nickelodeon game, but for lacrosse. They actually pay you to watch, because engagement numbers are everything. 

Sticks In Lacrosse Network - Game broadcast delivered in a condescending tone that will make you wonder if the person calling the game has an interesting opinion or is actually just complaining.

Several new streamers are also still vying to show games.

“We heard the fans loud and clear and gave them exactly what they wanted,” said an NCAA spokesperson, who was holding a monkey’s paw with one curled finger. “Fans don’t have to choose between games, they can enjoyed a staggered start to see all their favorite contests. Also, we now mimic the EPL and F1 experience by having competition begin before dawn on the east coast. Moreover gamblers can chase the money in a game that starts at midnight they know nothing about, just like college football fans do with Hawaii.”

This is a developing, and fake, story.