Under the previous structure, six teams qualified for the national championship final — and all other rounds of the postseason — so with just four events in women’s gymnastics, two teams had bye rotations at any given time. The problem with that? Casual fans never knew who was winning because teams were always in different stages of completing the competition. The solution — a four-team championship that has teams constantly in action — seems so obvious that Michigan Coach Bev Plocki said it has been proposed for decades. So why has it finally happened?

“ESPN falling in love with our sport,” said Margie Foster Cunningham, the longtime coach at George Washington, which didn’t advance past the round of 32. “We didn’t want to miss that opportunity.”

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So when the national championship wraps up this weekend in Fort Worth, and on ESPNU, it will do so with a Final Four for the first time and will be more viewer friendly than in past years.

“Let's say it comes down to the final gymnast on the final tumbling run: Can she stick her landing?” said Bart Conner, an Olympic gold medalist who provides play-by-play commentary for ESPN. “That's the buzzer-beater shot scenario in basketball that keeps fans coming back. Gymnastics has created a product like that.”

With the SEC Network’s launch in 2014 and the network’s commitment to gymnastics, coaches saw an opportunity to present their sport’s championship live. They realized the best way to do that would be the faster pace and easier-to-follow scoring that comes when just four teams are on the floor.

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Even though eliminating byes is also better for athlete wellness, programs still resisted that change, frequently out of fear of limiting opportunities. Now four teams advance to the final instead of six and eight teams compete in two semifinal sessions instead of 12. Coaches worried the format based on four-team meets would trim the postseason field from 36 to 32, a more natural number for a bracket. Streaks could end, and incentive bonuses could suffer. For some programs, qualifying for the postseason is not just an accolade but a signal to the athletic department that the sport shouldn’t be cut.

Previous format Previous format New format 36 teams at six regionals, two advance from each 36 teams at six regionals, two advance from each Eight teams in four first-round play-ins 12 teams in two national semifinals, three advance from each 12 teams in two national semifinals, three advance from each 32 teams at eight second-round meets, two advance from each Six teams in one final Six teams in one final 16 teams at four regional finals, two advance from each Eight teams at two national semifinals, two advance from each Four teams in one final

The new structure gained overwhelming support once coaches found a way to retain 36 teams by mirroring the play-in games in college basketball. This year’s postseason included a play-in round in which two teams competed for the last spot in the four regionals.

Greg Marsden, who coached at Utah for 40 years and retired in 2015, built a program that has averaged more than 10,000 fans per home meet for 15 straight seasons. He believes that once an exciting product exists, coverage will follow. But some of his peers wanted assurance that television networks would indeed show more interest if changes were made.

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“The last thing that anybody wanted to do was cut opportunities for programs and then find out that TV wasn’t interested anyway,” Plocki said. “… When [ESPN] started to show excitement about it and that was evident to us, then I felt like there was more of a confidence that if we do this, they will come.”

ESPN and its networks showed 51 meets live in 2014-15, a number that nearly doubled the following year and has grown to 123 in 2018-19. Nine competitions this season were broadcast live on ESPN or ESPN2, more than every other year combined. Olympic medalist Kathy Johnson Clarke, an ESPN analyst who works alongside Conner, calls dual meets “television heaven” because of their structure as back-and-forth contests.

Schools noticed what live coverage offered and helped give the broadcast crew what it needed — sometimes more time between routines to introduce an athlete or preseason video shoots with teams.

“Once they started to see the results and started to trust us and believe that we believe in their sport just as much as they do, I think that’s where you saw the change,” said Meg Aronowitz, ESPN’s coordinating producer for gymnastics. “Then we started to talk about format change in the postseason and what might be best.”

During a spring meeting, Stanford Coach Tabitha Yim, who loves spreadsheets and has a brother on staff with the Portland Trail Blazers, presented a visual representation of what coaches had discussed, mimicking the brackets used in basketball and other sports. Coaches collaborated and made adjustments before landing on this year’s version. When discussing the excitement they hope to create, the conversation almost always comes back to basketball’s March Madness.

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Gymnastics hasn’t fully embraced the terms used in other sports, such as calling the championship meet the Final Four, but some programs have leaned into these familiar phrases.

“We’ve got to do a better job of making it easily understandable to our peers, our administrators, our other coaches in our department, as well as the general public,” Marsden said. “… Our uniqueness should be what we do, not necessarily how we do it.”

With four regional sites instead of six, the top teams are less dispersed. For instance, No. 2 seed UCLA, No. 7 Michigan, No. 10 Alabama and No. 15 Nebraska competed for two spots in this year’s Elite Eight. (Last year, teams seeded No. 2, No. 11 and No. 14, along with three unseeded teams outside the top 18, competed for two spots in the national semifinals, which included 12 schools.) Plocki, whose Michigan team advanced by a 0.05 margin over Alabama, said, “I don’t know if we’ve ever had excitement in Crisler Arena as we did this year at the regional championship.”

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In the Sweet 16, two gymnasts for No. 4 Florida, a national title contender, fell on the balance beam, so one score had to count, allowing No. 13 Oregon State to qualify instead.

“We knew it was going to be intense and there were going to be great teams left out,” Johnson Clarke said. “That’s just the nature of this format. We see it in basketball all the time, baseball all the time, football all the time. There are upset potentials, whereas in gymnastics, the way it was created and the [previous] format almost prohibited an upset situation, so you didn’t have the drama that we saw at regionals.”

Some issues remain. The dramatic regional final in which Michigan barely edged Alabama was available only behind a paywall on FloGymnastics. Dan Margulis, ESPN’s senior director for college sports programming, said ideally ESPN will build toward having all four regionals on its networks. This year, it had two, the ones hosted by LSU and Georgia.

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Foster Cunningham loved the excitement when her team competed against Lindenwood in the play-in round, but that meet began at 4 p.m. on a Thursday. The regional finals, which determined the eight teams competing this weekend, took place on the same day as the men’s basketball Final Four.

“To grow the audience,” Johnson Clarke said, “we have to find the ideal time where we can own it.”

When the coaches meet again next month before their recruiting weekend in Indianapolis, there will be more discussions about the postseason. Is 36 still the right number of teams? What about those regionals that ended up more difficult than others? There will be a need for tweaks and improvements, which will spark more ideas, opinions and proposals in those meeting rooms.