OT: Yet Another Conference Football Realignment Thread (help please)
As part of an ESPN Radio contest, I've got to come up with the best version of realignment for college football.
There are a few things that are 100%. I'm set on an 8-team playoff. I'm set on 10-team conferences with a 9 game conference schedule. I can't STAND when you don't play every team in your conference. Also, I'm resigned to the fact that all current Power 5 teams must be included.
This current model doesn't have ANY conference championship games - it'll hurt me because revenue is part of the equation, so I'm open to adding them back. I just think that's too many games between the eventual national champion and the doormat of the conference who doesn't make a bowl. Schedule/Class interuption are also taken into account.
So...I've got...
- (8) 10-team conferences.
- 8-team playoff.
- Automatic qualify for playoff IF you win your conference AND finish the regular season ranked in the top 12 by the selection committee that already exists.
- If a champion is ranked 13 or below, that conferences automatic bid becomes an at-large bid. This way a #4 USC who only lost to #2 Oregon in OT would make the playoff over conference champion #17 Pitt.
- Bowls are decided AFTER the quarterfinal round of the playoff - quarterfinal losers, plus the other bowl eligible teams (winning records or above) go to regular bowls.
- Teams are seeded #1 - #8 by committee based on final rankings
- Quarterfinals are played at home site of higher seed (making the end of the season valuable for teams who may have their conference locked up...you want to be #4 rather than #5). "Year-long excitement" is another criteria.
- Semifinals and finals are played at neutral bowls like they are now.
- Sucks I had to split Kansas/KSU and Ole Miss/Miss St.
- Service academies are in, no debate.
Here are my conferences...
|
Northeast |
East |
Southeast |
South |
North |
Midwest |
Plains-Rockies |
West |
|
Army |
Cincinnati |
Air Force |
|||||
|
Fresno St. |
|||||||
|
Houston |
|||||||
|
Navy |
Boise St. |
||||||
|
Penn St. |
BYU |
SDSU |
|||||
|
South Carolina |
SMU |
Memphis |
|||||
|
Rutgers |
Tennessee |
Colorado St. |
|||||
|
Syracuse |
Virginia |
Notre Dame |
Kansas St. |
||||
|
UConn |
Virginia Tech |
UCF |
Texas A&M |
Purdue |
Washington |
||
|
Wake Forest |
USF |
Wisconsin |
Vanderbilt |
Washington St. |
I'll make changes if what you suggest make sense, but if I win the contest, you're not coming to the national championship game with me, sorry.
|
Northeast |
East |
Southeast |
South |
North |
Midwest |
Plains-Rockies |
West |
|
Army |
Cincinnati |
Air Force |
|||||
|
Fresno St. |
|||||||
|
Houston |
|||||||
|
Navy |
Boise St. |
||||||
|
Penn St. |
BYU |
SDSU |
|||||
|
South Carolina |
SMU |
Memphis |
|||||
|
Rutgers |
Tennessee |
Colorado St. |
|||||
|
Syracuse |
Virginia |
Notre Dame |
Kansas St. |
||||
|
UConn |
Virginia Tech |
UCF |
Texas A&M |
Purdue |
Washington |
||
|
Wake Forest |
USF |
Wisconsin |
Vanderbilt |
Washington St. |
Way too much meat in the North, South, Southeast and West. The other conferences lack.... well everything.
The east would be a nice basketball conference but horrible in football. The northeast would be just bad (same goes for plains/rockies and the midwest)
Agreed. It stinks!
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It will shake out by fall. Too many moving parts right now.
WolverineDevotee starts 5 UNIFORMZ/NIKE/JUMPMAN threads a day and wants to get all "again....?" over this one. I said from the jump it was beating a dead horse, but I figure if I'm going to put the time into the contest, I should ask some college football fans. Meanwhile you're crying about $70 gym shorts...and OMG THEY HAVE POCKETS!
This literally could've come from anyone else on this board EXCEPT you WD. Don't play yourself, broham.
I hate it, and I hope you lose your contest!
2 conference champions would get left out every year, and one of the two would almost certainly, nearly always be the champion from the proposed Northeast conference, which is super weak.
In other words, this setup would pretty much doom Penn St. to perpetual irrelevance, which I'm all for.
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Because it also says schedule/class schedules (I mentioned that above).
So basically what I figured was...you can have a 4-team playoff WITH conference championship games or an 8-team without them.
If you do 8 team with a conference championship game you're talking about a 12 game season for Wake Forest and a 16-game season for National Champion Michigan.
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You mean to tell me you wouldn't wanna see #1 Michigan vs #8 Miami in Ann Arbor the 2nd week of Decemeber?
That would be awesome.
Fuck always playing in Florida, Texas, Arizona or Cali.
I wouldn't pack my bags.
Bill Simmons had a podcast guest who rambled on and on about half-baked ideas. One of my favorite half-baked ideas that I came up with is to make an NFL team out of service academy graduates. They would be the 33rd team in the NFL. They wouldn't have a home stadium. Instead, one year they would play all the AFC teams and the next they would play all the NFC teams. These would all be road games. What you would have is a traveling team of ambassadors for the service academies. They would spend the week in your town extolling the virtues of the academies and doing recruiting for volunteers.
This would serve two purposes. 1) Instead of enriching the 32 owners exclusively, some of that Network TV financed NFL coin would come back to the taxpayers. 2) The football programs at the academies would be improved because the prospective players would see that there is a pathway to the NFL. Instead of serving their 5 year committments in Afghanistan or overseas protecting our allies, they could work in the states for 5 years as NFL players and recruiters. After 5 years, they'd be free agents to join any NFL team.
Maybe for the first few years, you schedule these as exhibitions until you can get the strength of the team right so that they are not getting blown out, (we don't want them to be the Washington Generals) but we also don't want them winning the Super Bowl every year because then the owners would nix the idea.
I prefer TWICE-baked...
4 power conferences:
B1g: um, msu, osu, iu, purdue, minny, wis, neb, nw, ill, psu, md, ru, nd, iowa, duke, unc, uva, gtech, fsu
Sec: FL, usc, tam, miz, lsu, Ole miss, missst, vand, tenn, uk, uga, bama, aub, ark, va tech, ncst, louis, wva, cinci, navy
Big12: texas, tcu, kansas, ksu, baylor, ttech, s flor, c flor, Memphis temple, Iowa st, pitt, syr, bc, wake, miami, clem, uconn, smu, tulane
Pac: oregon, osu, was, wast, cal, usc, ucla, stan, asu, ariz, utah, okla, osu, byu boise, houston, Nevada , air force, unlv, Utah st
B1g, sec, and pac will go nowhere and get what they want out of this. Texas and ND, followed by Oklahoma, and the prime acc schools (unc, duke, uva because of their prestige) remain the prize jewels. Followed by Florida State and Georgia Tech because of their locations.
Conferences with 20 teams make no sense unless they are in divisions, and if the latter, then 8 ten-team conferences are better than 4 twenty-team conferences, because you can set up a better playoff than having the first round always between the same set of divisions.
Admire your principles. But you kill far too many traditional rivalries, like Texas-Oklahoma and many others. Here's a far better arrangement (replaced Fresno State with UNLV), IMHO:
NORTHEAST: Pittsburgh; Notre Dame; Syracuse; Rutgers; Army; Connecticut; Boston College; Navy; Maryland; West Virginia
MIDEAST: Michigan; Ohio St.; Michigan St.; Penn St.; Indiana; Purdue; Illinois; Northwestern; Wisconsin; Minnesota
ATLANTIC: Virginia; Virginia Tech; Duke; North Carolina; North Carolina St.; Wake Forest; Clemson; Georgia Tech; Miami; Florida State
SOUTHEAST: Alabama; Auburn; Georgia; South Carolina; Kentucky; Tennessee; Mississippi; Mississippi St.; LSU; Florida
MIDWEST: Cincinnati; Louisville; Vanderbilt; Memphis; Missouri; Nebraska; Kansas; Kansas St.; Iowa; Iowa St.
MIDSOUTH: Arkansas; Oklahoma; Oklahoma St.; Texas; Texas A&M; TCU; SMU; Houston; UCF; USF
SOUTHWEST: Air Force; Arizona; Arizona St.; Colorado; Colorado St; Utah; BYU; Boise St.; Texas Tech; Baylor
PACIFIC: SDSU; USC; UCLA; UNLV; Stanford; California; Oregon; Oregon St.; Washington; Washington St.
ND thanks you for the autobid to playoff every year.
Okay, so switch Pittsburgh with Penn State and Navy with Virginia Tech? That would help mitigate the service academy problem, and Navy is a good fit for the ACC. And Pitt is a better fit with Northwestern and Michigan than Penn State, which is a great fit with the Hokies.
The overall system is fine, and I agree with you about the lack of need for a conference championship game with an 8-team playoff.
You want revenue? Have the final non-conference game (third week) be an inter-league challenge. Rotate the league pairings every year or every two years.
You've taken care of rivalries (with buckeyejr's suggestion), but you don't have much balance, if that matters. Southeast is a dog fight, south a cat fight, and northeast a pillow fight. You are probably right to value rivalries over balance, but, if your scheme has a weakness, balance is it.
Good luck.
reminded me of PSU's old schedule that allowed them to rack up so many wins vs. literally no competition for decades. That was one of the reasons they finished undefeated and w/o a NC for years. That has to be toughened.
I would suggest moving some out of the S.E. into the N.E. for balance alone.
Hold a draft. Only the current power 5 conferences are involved. First round each commissioner picks one of their existing members. Second round, the schools picked in the first round pick any available school. Thrid round, the second round picks choose any avaiilable school. Use a serpentine order. Schools can pass at any time. The next round pick would then go to the commissioner. If he passes, that conference is done.
It won't be neat. Not every conference will have the same number. But rivalries will be preserved. It will make some geographic sense and the process would generate a ton of interest.
I'd let every school veto their own selection once. If they do it twice, they're no longer eligible for the draft. The leftovers can join a group of five, be independent or form a new conference.