The DIA playoffs kick off this weekend but not without a little upheaval.

Various factors within college rugby, even among the larger programs, are still sometimes making the end of the year difficult. Being answerable to your college administration—athletic department, rec sports, or something else—can sometimes be a ‘be careful what you wish for’ experience.

So it is that we already know that Ohio State, despite being Big 10 champs, aren’t in the playoffs. School admin decisions on budgets, as much as anything else, led the Buckeyes to pull out despite having played a series of 15s games to warm up for the April push.

What that did was prompt Texas A&M to be moved from the West bracket to the East bracket. This turned out to be a good thing as since the new #5 and #6 seeds, Arizona and Grand Canyon, had tied, it would have been difficult to put one of those in the playoffs and one on the outside.

Ha. Joke's on us. The cost for Grand Canyon to fly to Seattle to play Central Washington was so high they had to pull out (an ongoing labor dispute at Alaska Airlines hasn’t helped). UCLA was asked to fill in but couldn’t. Cal Poly will go, and really in terms of rankings and level of play there is little separating GCU, UCLA, and CPSLO.

Meanwhile, Texas A&M was dealing with the fact that they would be hosting during Red, White, & Blue Weekend, which is a big weekend centered around the spring intrasquad scrimmage for the football program.

Everything shuts down for a practice football game? Absolutely. At many schools that take football very seriously, this is a huge spring event.

The upshot was that A&M Rugby could only host on Friday night, a fact they had communicated to the DIA leadership some time ago. Arkansas State, set to be A&M’s opponent, couldn’t do Friday. As a result … ASU moves on.

Technically it’s a forfeit by Texas A&M rather than just no game being played. But to call it a forfeit ignores the realities that some programs have to deal with.

(The Red, White, & Blue game is also a microcosm of the spring-play argument—at some schools where football is really, really important, it can basically shut down almost any other activity.)

In the end it is more unfortunate than anything else. 

Meanwhile, Arizona is at BYU, a rematch of a March 19 meeting in which BYU won 55-19, and Navy is at Life. The last time Navy played Life was November 9, 2019, in which Life won 24-19. Cal Poly last played Central Washington Jnuary 19, 2019, when CWU won 66-19.

So the first round on Saturday, April 9 looks like this:

Navy at Life 1:30PM ET Live on FloRugby>> 

Arizona at BYU  1PM MT Probably Live on YouTube>>

Cal Poly at Central Washington Noon PT Live YouTube>>

Byes to Quarterfinals: 

Arkansas State (Texas A&M could only host on Friday)

Cal (Ranked #1, PAC Conference Champions)

Army (Ranked #2, Rugby East Champions)

Saint Mary’s (Ranked #3, California Conference Champions)

Lindenwood (Ranked #4, Mid-South Conference Champions)