Born Weird

I used to be a huge college football fan, but over the last 10 years or so my allegiance has shifted to the National Football League. Reasons are myriad and I won’t go into them here. Suffice to say that I think college football is very, very broken.

A recent ESPN.com piece on revamping the NHL led me to ponder how I would go about fixing college football. And I think there are three central changes that need to be made: conference realignment, meritocratic membership, and a new postseason format. Perhaps none of these ideas are new individually, but I think the combination would re-make the college game in a way that would create more excitement (and more fairness). I’ll address each individually.

And before I start: yes, yes, I know this is utterly unrealistic. That’s not the point.

Conference Realignment

The first pillar of reworking college ball is realignment. Rather than our current patchwork of conferences of greatly varying size and quality, I’d standardize the leagues by moving some teams around. Top-tier college football would be limited to seven conferences of twelve teams each: The SEC, ACC, Big XII, Really Big 10, Pac 12, Big East and Big West.

The SEC and Big XII would remain unchanged as they already have the prerequisite number of teams.

The ACC would drop Boston College (sorry, I know they just joined the league, but they’re just too damn far north) and get Navy instead. No, I don’t expect them to be happy about it.

The current Big Ten would be renamed the Really Big Ten and would add Notre Dame (I know, I know) as the twelfth team, thus creating two divisions:

The current Pac-10 would add two teams, Hawaii and Fresno State, to reach the requisite twelve, also creating two divisions:

The current Big East only has eight teams (thanks to being raided by the ACC). While it’d make the most sense to draw from existing Big East basketball schools to fill it out, I’m only going to draw from other I-A (er, FBS) schools. The four schools I’d add would be Boston College (ripped back from the ACC), Army, Marshall, and, uhh… East Carolina. Our divisions:

While several of these changes are already pretty radical, the biggest would be the creation of a new major conference, the Big West, which would be an amalgam of top teams from just-outside-the-BCS conferences. It’d have the following:

So that does it: 84 schools in seven conferences. There are some regrettable omissions (e.g. Southern Miss), of course, but that’s not so hugely problematic, because of the next part of the plan.

Meritocracy

College football should adopt European soccer-style league promotion and demotion. While the gap between top-tier and minor league professional sports in the U.S. is too large to handle this, it’d work great for college football.

Rather than shifting membership annually, since a single season can depend on so many factors, each of the seven leagues would have its membership shift once every three years (thus giving every four-year player a theoretical shot at playing D-I). Three-year cycles would be staggered across conferences so every year 2 or 3 conferences would welcome new teams.

Yes, teams, plural. Rather than just drop one team every three years, each conference would drop two. But not, as you might initially think, the team with the worst winning percentage in each division over the preceeding three-year span. No, each conference would lose, in addition to the team with the worst record, the school with the lowest academic progress rate (or, if you prefer a different metric, graduation rate).

This provides incentive for perennial doormats to either get their acts together or bow out of playing with the big boys (a chance some schools might actually relish). It also would help light a fire under the football-factory schools where academics has for too long taken a backseat.

Promoted teams would be pulled from the ranks of I-AA, to which a few current I-A conferences would now belong (such as the MAC). Each of the Big Seven conferences would be affiliated with two I-AA, er, FCS, conferences, with the top performer (based solely on record) from each getting bumped up every three years.

No longer would the NCAA have to issue bizarre bureaucratic penalties on schools that don’t take academics seriously. No longer would the NCAA have to enforce stadium size or attendance requirements for playing in the top leagues; schools can earn it of their own accord.

And think how much additional interest this would generate in games that previously have been ignored; that late-season Indiana/Northwestern or Baylor/Iowa State game could suddenly have a lot riding on it. And wouldn’t more people start to pay closer attention to I-AA ball, to see who might be getting bumped up?

As an added wrinkle, it might not be a bad idea to only count victories against teams in the I-A tier when calculating winning percentage for purposes of determining who gets demoted. This would help suppress the nasty habit of powerhouse schools scheduling nonconference creampuffs.

Postseason Play

The current BCS is good at getting the “top two teams” to play one another for the title. Problem is determining the top two teams. The solution, of course, is to settle it on the field via a playoff that’s built upon the existing bowl/BCS system.

The first step is to shorten the season back down to 11 games from the current 12, buying an extra week of postseason play. We then take the seven conference champions, plus the top five ranking teams in the Bowl Championship Playoff (BCP), and seed them according to their BCP rankings.

The top four teams would have byes; the lower eight teams would play one another the weekend following conference championships. Winners of those games would play the top four squads the following weekend. (Since we cut a week of regular-season games, conference championships could happen right after Thanksgiving.) That leaves four teams, who would face off on or about New Years, with the national championship game happening the following weekend — about the same time it does now.

The twist is that existing bowls would host playoff games. Nearly-major bowls like the Holiday, Gator, Outback and Capital One would host first-round games. Chick-Fil-A and Cotton would host second-round games, as well as a pair of existing BCS bowls. Semifinals would be held by the remaining two BCS bowls (rotating every year which two got to host semifinals), with the championship, as it is now, standing on its own. Other bowls would be allowed to persist, mired in mediocrity as they are now, if they so chose.

This playoff system would have the national champions playing at most 16 games — more than is typically played by a college team, sure. But it’s not a stretch if you consider that BYU played 15 games in 1996, for example. The season wouldn’t take any more calendar time than it does now, and the sum total of team-games a season would actually be lower due to the return to an 11-game schedule.

Problems

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this plan will never get put into place — not even just the playoff portion. It’s fraught with practical problems (Notre Dame and the Big Ten’s history, for one) as well as logistical ones (e.g. all of I-AA/FCS would need to be realigned to create two “feeder” conferences for the Big Seven). But if you will, sit back and think about what it would be like to follow college football under a system like this one. One that’s dynamic, rewards good play, punishes bad academics and lets a national champion be determined on the field.

I think it’d be fabulous. What do you think?