College football has a problem and I have a solution. The problem is that their conferences have blown themselves out of reasonable size. The super-conferences have created strange cross-regional matchups that look more like bad bowl games instead of the conference game that they are. The Big Ten has a lot more than ten teams in it, which is dumb, and it now stretches from coast-to-coast, which is also dumb. A nationwide conference is not a conference. Things need to change.
Plenty of football teams fly first-class. But think of how a nationwide conference harms so many other sports on campus. Women’s volleyball at West Virginia now has to travel to Arizona for a conference game. On a bus? On a jet? The ridiculous geographical distance also effects football programs. Oklahoma State has a public tracker for their equipment van, and the long treks are costly.
So, here’s my solution and it all starts with major conference realignment.
138 teams into 10 conferences. Six conferences are considered Power Conferences and four are made up of smaller programs. It’s all based on geography. For the most part, compactness is accomplished with only a few unavoidable exceptions. Location, location, location.
It breaks down into 6 old conferences and 4 new conferences. Traditional conferences: ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, PAC 12, and SEC. I preserved the old Big Ten (it actually has 10 teams). The Big 12 and Pac 12 both have, you’ll never guess, 12 teams. The new SEC survives. The Big East is back with a few changes. The ACC stays legit. The new conferences are American Gulf Coast, Big North, Big Central, and Big West. They are larger conferences made up of smaller schools. American Gulf Coast Conference ought to ruffle some feathers.
Ten conferences winners, and I guess I’ll never win the no-wild-card argument, so six wild card teams will make for a 16-team playoff. The first round will also be regional. The Big East winner plays the ACC winner. The PAC 12 plays the Big West. The SEC plays the American Gulf Coast Conference. The Big 12 plays the Big North. The Big 10 plays the Big Central. Every year. This will make for a super-regional first round. The Wild Cards have to play each other.
The first-round games would be home games for the higher-ranked school. That won’t leave much debate for the conference winners and should create lots of debate for the Wild Card games. This gives added incentive to teams to win their conference. The smaller school will have little chance on the road at a national powerhouse, but upsets are not so unusual anymore. This set-up will create a Super Regional winner. Sure, there will be plenty of first-round blowouts in this format, but it’s a chance for more than that and everyone can benefit. The ACC-Big East Super Regional should give us two top teams. And those three Wild Card first-round games will make for big matchups between big programs. After the first round, the teams will re-seed, and we’ll be left with eight powerhouse programs playing for the National Championship. Bowl Games can continue for the teams outside the 16. With six Wild Cards, there will still be some good teams for exciting Bowl Games.
| ACC– 12 teams Clemson Coastal Carolina Duke Florida Atlantic Florida State Georgia Tech Maryland Miami NC State North Carolina Wake Forest Virginia Big Ten– 10 Illinois Indiana Iowa Michigan Michigan State Minnesota Northwestern Ohio State Purdue Wisconsin SEC– 16 Alabama Arkansas Auburn Florida Georgia Kentucky LSU Missouri Miss. State Oklahoma Ole Miss South Carolina Tennessee Texas Texas A&M Vanderbilt American Gulf Coast– 16 Florida International Jacksonville State Louisiana Tech Louisiana Sam Houston South Alabama South Florida Southern Miss. SMU Troy Tulane UAB UCF UL Monroe UTEP UTSA Big West– 16 Air Force Boise State Colorado State Fresno State Hawai’i Nevada New Mexico New Mexico State North Texas North Dakota State Sacramento State San Diego State San Jose State Texas State UNLV Wyoming | Big East– 12 Boston College East Carolina Cincinnati Louisville Penn State Pitt Rutgers Syracuse Temple UConn Virginia Tech West Virginia Big 12– 12 Baylor BYU Colorado Houston Iowa State Kansas Kansas State Nebraska Norte Dame Oklahoma State Texas Tech TCU PAC 12– 12 Arizona Arizona State Cal Oregon Oregon State Stanford UCLA USC Utah Utah State Washington Washington State . . Big Central-18 Appalachian State Arkansas State Charlotte Delaware Georgia Southern Georgia State James Madison Kennesaw State Liberty Marshall Miami (OH) Middle Tennessee Missouri State Memphis Old Dominion Rice Tulsa Western Kentucky . Big North– 14 Army Akron Ball State Bowling Green Buffalo Kent State Ohio Eastern Michigan Central Michigan Western Michigan Navy Northen Illinois Toledo UMass |
The way the conferences choose how to pick their conference champion is left to the conferences to decide. Each conference is different, the sizes vary from 10 teams to 18 teams, the regional compactness further separates the conferences from each other. All this is then best left to the conferences themselves to decide how their championship game will materialize. For example, the SEC can have East and West divisions and the top teams from each subdivision can play for the title. Or stay with their new top two teams in the all-conference standings. The new conferences here are fairly large, so dividing them into two divisions seems logical.
Some want a system that will ensure the best team finishes first, the second-best team finishes second, and so on. That’s pie in the sky. Sports aren’t perfect. You have to win on the field. Otherwise, all the rankings, stats, and computer analysis would conclude that the game doesn’t even need to be played. Alabama over UAB, every time. Well, sometimes David beats Goliath and when he does, the whole country gets excited. The NCAA basketball tournament gives us this when small schools advance and college football could to.
The only major difference between this new conference alignment and today’s is that the smaller conference schools merge into large conferences. That’s the only way for them to have a seat at the playoff table. The four conference winners will be more like 16th seeds in the NCAA basketball tournament. And they can be Cinderellas for sure. LSU vs. a 10-2 UL Monroe could be the upset the nation roots for. Ball State beating Notre Dame would be great. The small conferences will get a lot more attention this way and that will lead to better recruiting, better teams, which will mean more competitiveness. Those first-rounds games would be interesting, and they would certainly sell out for the home team.
Speaking of Notre Dame, everyone has to join a conference. Right now, only UConn and the Fighting Irish are the only Independents. They have to join up. I have Notre Dame in the Big 12 and UConn in the Big East, which makes the most sense geographically. And if Notre Dame can’t win their conference, and if they can’t get a Wild Card, then they don’t have to go to a Bowl Game. They can stay home and pout. Football is a violent game so if a team is too scared to play, then they won’t be forced. Public ridicule and negative messaging campaigns will be the only punishment.
If there were to be any Independents in this new alignment, then it should only be the three US service academies. Air Force, Army, and Navy are entirely different programs structurally from the rest of the competition. They have obvious recruitment limitations that take them out of play for the country’s best young athletes who are looking to go pro. David Robinson was an anomaly. I have Air Force in the Big West and Army and Navy playing in the Big North. Geographical compactness is not exactly met with Navy in the North, but where else do they go? They don’t fit competitive-wise with bigger programs in the ACC and the Big East, which would be their geographical home, and they are too far east for the Big Central. Navy is a school that is tough to fit in here.
North Dakota State University is another team that doesn’t exactly fit. I have them in the Big West, which stretches that conference from San Deigo to North Dakota (Hawai’i is an outlier no matter where you put it, so it isn’t fair to measure the conference from North Dakota to Hawai’i). But North Dakota falling outside geographical compactness goals highlights that maybe they don’t fit in the top tier of college football. 138 teams is too many. I would cut around 30 of them, but this plan doesn’t. Demoting, downgrading, playing to stay in, are all topics for another time.
If sharing big TV revenue was the motivation for today’s nationwide conferences, then the answer under this new system is to reduce conference games a little to allow for more non-conference big games. There could be a weekend early in the season when the SEC plays the PAC 12, the Big 12 plays the Big Ten, in national televised games. The match-ups would alternate. That way a weird conference game of today would become a special game due to less frequency. We can still have Michigan and USC, just not every year, but every year we would have big conferences playing each other.
TV revenue is huge and has turned this game into a billion-dollar industry. A multi-conference agreement on sharing TV money should satisfy the needs of all. Another thing college football needs is New York City. The country’s largest media market is the greater New York metropolitan area and every weekend college football is shutout of the New York City action. Neighboring Rutgers and UConn are never good enough to draw NYC attention, and they aren’t in New York anyways. The solution is several big games throughout the season in Giants Stadium. My biggest gripe about conferences that fail to meet geographical compactness is what it does to all the other sports on campus. Football flies, so it doesn’t really matter if UCLA plays Indiana in northern Jersey, or Texas plays Miami in Philly. But it does matter to those markets and nationwide TV audiences.
Games overseas are also fine in this format. Again, football flies. A trip to Ireland may be the only chance for some of those young men and women (staff, cheerleaders, band) to travel overseas. Dare I suggest that it could be an educational experience. Arizona State has a satellite campus in London, so they could play a “home game” 5,000 miles away.
College football has a problem. The biggest schools may not see this, but everyone else does. These solutions fix the problems. Smaller conferences of smaller schools need to merge. A 16-team playoff with six Wild Cards gives everyone a chance to compete. Frequent games in pro stadiums in New York, Philadelphia, LA will generate enough TV revenue. This plan can work. Let’s make it happen. Write your congressman, university president, Nick Saban, Pat McAfee, and whoever can make this reasonable plan a reality.