My idea for NCAA conference realignment
My first thread so please be gentle.
A co-worker and I hashed this out over 15 minutes so it's obviously not perfect.
I'm less concerned with which schools go where. I put more thought into what the overall layout was and how champions were determined. I think the idea of 4 super conferences is great with the division winners playing as a first round to an 8-team playoff. Each conference has 16 teams and they are linked to a "minor league" conference that makes sense geographically. So the Big Ten would have the MAC as their minor league. The worst team in the Big Ten gets demoted down to the MAC and the MAC champs get promoted up at the end of the season. This is what they do with professional soccer and I think the system works brilliantly. Now you give the UCF's of the world a chance to compete, but it needs to be sustained performance over a couple seasons. Also, bye bye Rutgers. They won't even be able to compete in the MAC. PAC 12, SEC, and ACC all do the same.
What did I miss?
December 11th, 2018 at 1:23 PM ^
"What did I miss?"
The point.
December 11th, 2018 at 1:29 PM ^
What you missed is how you get any of these schools to agree to this, or how to force neat and tidy order on an inherently chaotic situation. If you can figure out how to do the latter, there's a lot of money to be made in places besides just dreaming up conference realignment scenarios.
December 11th, 2018 at 1:41 PM ^
Relagation works in pro sports because you are building a franchise. College athletics you have to much turnover to sustain this system.
December 11th, 2018 at 1:45 PM ^
It doesn't really work anymore in pro sports. It's a financial disaster for relegated teams.
December 11th, 2018 at 2:04 PM ^
That's something that doesn't get discussed enough: relegation is objectively awful for everybody except casual fans of a sport. Americans love relegation in the EPL because it's incredibly fun to watch from a distance.
The real, on-the-ground facts seem to be that relegation is a bad idea when most of a team's revenue comes from a television contract negotiated by the league. When money came from ticket and merchandise sales, great--the teams with the most support generally ended up at the appropriate level. Unfortunately, promotion/relegation seems to have created a permanent "lower middle class" of teams that yo-yo between the bottom half of the EPL and the top half of the next division (whatever they call that now).
December 11th, 2018 at 3:28 PM ^
relegation wouldn't be fair to all the other sports where teams are performing at or above average, only to get punished by the football team - this has big $$$ implications for these smaller sports.
December 11th, 2018 at 6:02 PM ^
There's a big problem with relegation in college football, which is you can't relegate teams without them signing on to it and there's no way a school will give up tens of millions of dollars for a demotion. No one is in charge of college football. That made it quirky but now I feel it's a problem.
December 11th, 2018 at 8:55 PM ^
I'm new here but I hope you will all hear me out on this idea to reorganize college football.
I would forget about middle- and lower-tier college football, which is losing millions for all of those schools. I would have the 32 best college teams, and privatize them into franchises owned by very wealthy people who could afford to pay the players what they deserve for putting out a really great product. They would have a union, and a collective bargaining agreement. It seems fair to me.
We would organize the 32 teams into two conferences, and each of the conferences would be organized into North, South, East and West divisions. We'd try to protect historic rivalries within those divisions. And each year, balanced schedules would be organized by the league based on last year's performance (for non-divisional games).
We'd have a few (four sounds about right) preseason games, and then a 16-game regular season before the playoffs. The divisional winners would get into the playoffs, plus two wild card teams from each conference (which will maintain playoff interest deep into the regular season).
The championship game at the conclusion of that 12-team single-elimination playoff scheme would be between the two conference champions, and we'd have to come up with a name for that bowl game. I can't think of a name for what we might call it, but maybe you can. It would be the super-est bowl game of the season.
So what do you think? Could this work?
We could take it a step further and organize how players get picked for college teams. What we could do, is get all of the team representatives together in a meeting hall in the mid-spring, and they could take turns selecting players based on their prospects. The worst team from last year would select first, followed by the next-worst team, going in rounds from worst to best repeatedly until everyone's roster was filled.
I am liking the sound of this! Just running it up the flagpole to see who salutes.