Andy McEntee

McEntee suggests championship overhaul

There is no quarter asked or given in NFL Div 2. Seven games in nine weeks between eight teams of relatively equal standing, if Meath manager Andy McEntee had his way he believes that is the model championship football should be following.
McEntee believes the current championship model is broken and it needs fixing and at a media briefing ahead of next Sunday's NFL Div 2 clash with Armagh he came up with a solution.
“That's the beauty of the League and I think that's why a lot of people would like to see the Championship structured in a similar manner,” said McEntee.
“It's a good competition. You could throw a blanket over nearly all of the teams in our group and on any given day anyone could beat anyone else.
“That's probably the hallmark of a really good competition and that's the beauty of the League.”
McEntee believes an All-Ireland Championship divided into two tiers either at the outset or by the knock-out stage would replicate the same sort of closely contested matches we've seen so far during the League.
“You have 16 teams in Div 1 and Div 2, so you could divide that into four groups of four and everybody gets three games which I think is important for teams that are trying to develop and close the gap on the top-tier teams because you're not going to do that without playing matches.
“If you could guarantee everybody three games, I think you'd have more buy-in from players. There's a lot of talk about people not committing to the county scene, but if you thought you were only going to get one or two games in a year, that's probably one of the issues.
“I think if you had four groups of four, and then the top two in those go into quarter-finals.
“And even if you wanted to expand it you could have eight groups of four and you could include everybody and then the top two in each group go into competition A and the bottom two in each group into competition B. That's another possibility.”