Idea: Alternative to the Showcase
I like Seth's idea about the Showcase, but I think it is too complicated in the end and requires waivers that are unlikely and requires teams that just want their season to be over to add a meaningless game. But, I have a similar-ish idea that I think would significantly improve the B1G and not require any rule changes or waivers.
1. Divisions change every two years, based on four pods.
B1G East - Penn State, Rutgers, Maryland
B1G North - Michigan, MSU, OSU
B1G South - Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Northwestern
B1G West - Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska
2. During the 2/6 years that the East and North combine, one team from the South or West has to move over. This would only happen for two out of every 48 years for each team in the South and West.
3. Each team plays 3 non-conference games and 8 scheduled conference games. Conference games would be the 6 within your division plus two crossovers. Ideally crossovers are chosen for competitive balance.
4. The ninth conference game is a position round that includes two B1G semifinals. The two division winners host the second place team from the other division. After that, you go 3vs3, 4vs4, and so on with adjustments made to avoid rematches and balance home and away schedules.
5. In the next week, the two semi final winners play for the conference championship.
Benefits - Much better rotation of teams on and off the schedule than current system. Semifinals and rotating divisions increase the possibility that the championship game will have the best two teams. There is no chance Michigan and Ohio State would play in back to back weeks. The UM / OSU game moves off of Thanksgiving weekend allowing for better crowds and students to be there. On campus semifinal games would be awesome environments. No need for waivers or extra games.
Drawbacks - It's still complicated and people don't like that. Potential for home / away imbalance and the need to schedule on campus games with one week notice. Some rivalries that are worth protecting (OSU / PSU) would not play every year.
and requires teams that just want their season to be over to add a meaningless game.
Football players want to play football. If they just want the season to be over, they ain't real football players.
Also are you a closet PSU fan? I don't think you could have given them an easier run.
Players opt out of Bowl Games every year. Even the most football of football guys might think twice about suiting up for a 20 degree Illinois / Rutgers game on the first Saturday of December.
Sitting out to avoid injury and losing millions before the draft is one thing. Sitting out because you just want the season to be over is entirely different.
I still prefer the showcase. It is complicated, but then again so is bowl game selection, Heisman voting, recruiting, and the entire NCAA oversight. At least this is a good kind of complicated. It also feels progressive, which isn't something I normally think of in tandem with Big Ten Football.
My solution: Addition by Subtraction.
Kick out Rutger, Maryland, Nebraska, and PSU. Play every other team except 1 every year. (If you're hell-bent on keeping PSU, skip two teams each year). Which team(s) get skipped rotates through the schedule every year.
Nobody is getting kicked out unless there is a major scandal. Just add two ACC teams like Duke and UNC [would make basketball awesome if nothing else] and then set up two divisions (old school and new school B1G) based on when they entered the league. Toss in Illinois and Indiana with the new schools to even the division numbers out and there you go...
It would be like going back to the Bo era scheduling except that the "new" B1G division would take the place of the P5 non-conference game.
That is simply not going to happen. So there is no constructive purpose in discussing it. We may as well stick to the possible.
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And you called MY system complicated? For the record, you can use a showcase with pods, or with divisions, or with any schedule. It's one sentence: "The final week of the season you play the best games that haven't yet been played."
With all due respect, yeah, yours is more complicated and a bigger deviation from what is happening now. Finishing seasons with position rounds is pretty normal stuff.
Disagree. Seth's system is a +1 format where each team plays one more game featuring the best matchups that haven't been played (and no rematches). Super easy to understand even for me, who is drunk most of the time.
Maybe. Obviously I like my idea better because it's my idea...
The more I think about my idea, I shouldn't have combined two ideas. Idea one is to make the divisions change every two years, but that is unnecessary for the championship idea.
The second idea is to take the 9 game regular season as it is, drop it down to 8 and make the 9th game a position round that also includes semifinals. The simplicity is, come in first or second in your division and make the semis, then if you win your semi you play for the championship. I think knowing exactly which game determines the championship and not having to add a 13th game for every team are the major plusses to my system.
Both "The Showcase" and this idea (1) are too complicated, (2) add quite a few unnecessary games, (3) have logistical issues that haven't been addressed (it's not trivial for any school, with only 6 days notice, to not know whether they have a home game to prep for or not) and (4) are non-starters in the minds of many coaches and the conference execs.
We can debate whether we have divisions or not. But when it comes to a Championship Week, we need one and only one game per conference that week. That game being the winner-take-all title game, be it division winners or just the top 2 teams, be it a rematch or not.
Let the teams not playing in the Championship Game get an off-week. It's early December, they've played 12 games in 13 weeks already, they already don't get Thanksgiving as a holiday to enjoy and it's nearing Finals time for many schools. They don't need another game. Let them either transition to prepping for a Bowl game or transition to their full off-season.
For what it's worth, my plan does not add any games and has only one game on championship weekend. Your point on logistics is valid and is a weakness.
Re: #3, for the Showcase (and this would work with pods as well), there's a very simple solution, which the Big Ten already has in place right now: the team that played just 4 home games in the first nine gets to host.
We do this now: of the 9 Big Ten games, all the teams that have 4 home games play each other, and all the teams that have 5 home games play each other in the regular season. This *sounds* complicated, but it's actually the simplest way to make a schedule, whether you have divisions or not. Check any year: either everyone in the West played five Big Ten home games, or everyone in the East did.
So at the end of the 9-game regular season you have:
- Seven teams that only hosted four home games, And
- Those seven teams have all already played each other.
As long as the 10th game has no rematches, *EVERY* possible matchup has one team that's owed a 5th Big Ten home game, and one team that isn't. The team owed a 5th home game therefore hosts, and at the conclusion of the season every team got 5 home games, or, if we only play some of the Showcase games, every team had an opportunity to earn 5 home games.
Because you know this ahead of the season--and I wrote this in the Showcase proposal and mentioned it on WTKA--that means you know way ahead of time who's hosting the Showcase game, just not who's playing where. You also know the 4 teams that you haven't played.
I'll show you an example. For 2022, all of this is already true, right now:
- Penn State has FIVE Big Ten home games.
- Penn State does not play Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, or Illinois.
- Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Illinois have FOUR Big Ten home games.
If we add a Showcase game, Penn State knows they are playing it at Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, or Illinois (and based on how good they are, can probably guess it's one of Iowa or Wisconsin). Also each of those teams knows that they are going to host a Showcase game that weekend. Their fans can book flights and hotels. Their police forces can plan for gamedays. Their bars can order extra kegs of beer. All right now.
This same system could work with Kilgore Trout's pods proposal. Say UM-OSU-MSU and Wis-Neb-Iowa-Minn are a conference this and next year. This year, all of those teams would get 4 home games on their schedules, and would play each other. PSU-RU-MD and NW-IL-PU-IU* would get 5 home games, and would all play each other. When you go to play the Showcase, every matchup will be one division versus the other, ergo every matchup will have one team that deserves, and therefore gets, and therefore has scheduled well in advance, a 5th home game. In the 2nd year of each rotation, you flip which division gets the extra home game, and the other division becomes the Showcase hosts.
As long as they use that system, and there's no reason they shouldn't since it's the basis of most scheduling processes, your #3 is invalidated. If they use neutral sites, those sites could also be chosen well in advance. They might do it all in Indianapolis, or do it there, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York, and Philly, or whatever, but either way having those sites selected means the Big Ten will have already secured all the resources (hotel rooms, event spaces, etc.) well in advance. The teams all have travel covered.
Also, re #4, I have three assistant coaches on two teams onboard with the Showcase idea. You would be surprised how badly football people want to play more football games, even if they interfere with finals. As for the execs: $.
Re #1: "At the end of the season play the best games that weren't played." That's the proposal. If that's too complicated, how the fuck do you people understand the game of football?
Re #2: Valid. I personally want to see Rutgers-Nebraska at the end of the season, but one of the things that I learned by running through the last 20 years was most of the down-ticket games were only going to be of moderate interest. They're valuable mostly to the schools, since ending the season with a victory can make for a vastly better offseason, and half the bad teams would be doing just that.
* [This is my main issue with Kilgore Trout's proposal: He separates the 3's and 4's way too much, creating a massive schedule imbalance. A pods system needs an even number of teams so you can mix and match the pods. Trust me: I spent WAYYY too much time trying to make these same pods work over the years. Like, I filled pages of waterproof notepad in our shower with this. Better to just link every team to two rivalries, like Dochterman proposed. Also Trout wants rematches, which means it's an affront to college football.]
I appreciate the response. Like I mentioned above, I should separate out the pod / division idea from the championship idea. They are separate and not really related.
"Re #1: "At the end of the season play the best games that weren't played." That's the proposal. If that's too complicated, how the fuck do you people understand the game of football?"
- Choosing the games isn't the complicated part to me, it's that the champion isn't always apparent when the games end, unless you're proposing a Premier League style system where all the games kick off at the exact same time. American sports tend to favor a standalone championship game
Re home / away balance, I think you still need divisions to do this in the Showcase system, right? A rotating schedule with fixed rivals doesn't guarantee that the best team you didn't play didn't have the same home / road split as you. I may be missing something here, but I am pretty sure you need fixed divisions of some sort for at least a two year period for this to work.
Re rematches, I just disagree. I don't have an inherent problem with rematches if it's clear that you are getting the best two teams. That's probably just a subjective style preference, but rematches are fine with me.
Re 13th games for everyone, I still think that's unrealistic.
All that said, if you boil my idea down to the below, I think it's simple and still preferable.
8 game prescheduled conference season with 7 team divisions, 9th game is position round with 1A hosting 2B and 1B hosting 2A, winners to play in neutral site championship game.
I was thinking more about this...and there's nothing that says you can't have more than one championship game, right? So keep the showcase, but only play the games that would affect who the champ is. Everyone of those games is a "championship game" because that 10th conference game determines who is the champ...
Actually this is probably less likely to happen because then there's a variable amount of 10th games that could be played. whoops. Nevermind.
The extra games are a problem for selling the Showcase. You may have covered this already, but if you just play the top game in the Showcase you avoid rematchs and get a game which is comparable to what you'd get with the current division system.
This is way too confusing.
I read it all, but really, I knew this wasn't going to work at:
- "2. During the 2/6 years that the East and North combine, one team from the South or West has to move over..."
Also, I think that Minnesota and Wisconsin reject it out of hand any alignment that has a "North" without them.
I studied Seth's showcase theory and could rarely break it. I tried to eliminate, rotate divisions, go by previous years SOS and winning pct, and emulate the NFL. As long as protected rivalries exist, an oddball 14 teams, and the premise the top teams will always be the top teams (unlike the NFL). It's the easiest and most plausible solution that I would get on board with.
If I had a month to sit down and spreadsheet it out, or protected rivalries didn't exist maybe there is a marginally better solution. But Seth's plan is the best I've seen so far.
I've put some thought into your plan Kilgore and WOW. Not calling it a bad idea but it's a challenge for the average fan to digest. I do applaud you that you put this much thought in it however.
You criticize Seth’s idea for being complicated, but this seems far more complicated to me.