How to fix college football

The Game Room
1

Conference re-alignment is a mess. The NCAA does not control anything about the game except penalties which has gotten us into the issues we have today including how it took so long it took to get a decent (but not great) playoff system. And news here: even now it is not the NCAA playoff. It is the college football playoff and the NCAA does not control it. The schools do. It is a step above the bowl games running the post-season but only slightly. So how would you fix the issues that college football is facing?

I would start by putting the NCAA in charge so schools/conferences no longer play for networks. Then I would regionalize the country. Please allow some flexibility with the borders. I’ll explain later.
Pacific: Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California
Southwest: Nevada, Arizona. New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma
Rocky Mountain: Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado
Midwest: N. Dakota, S. Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri
Deep South: Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and all states south
Northwest Territory: Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio
Atlantic: Virginia on up.
???: There should be a 8th conference here where the schools are most dense for this reason

16 Teams in each region. This is why we would need to be flexible with the regions since the South may have 20 teams in those states and the Southwest only has 13. so the regions would not follow state borders as strictly.

Each region has 2 divisions. Roughly geographical in nature. In a 12 game season you play against your 7 division opponents, 2 other teams in your region on a 4 year rotating cycle and 3 out of region games you schedule.

Playoffs: The 8 regions have conference championships between the division winners. This is actually the first round. Win and in.

Bowl games minimize travel for teams and fans
Rose Bowl (the Granddaddy alternates with no one): Pacific and Rocky Mountain winners
Cotton Bowl & Fiesta Bowl Alternate: Southwest and Midwest Winner
Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl Alternate: Deep South and I suspect ???
No Clue Bowls: No premier bowls in the cold region of the US for NW Territory and Atlantic. I have no doubt that we’d have bowl games quite quick in indoor arenas.

At this point we could have a ranking system so #1 plays #4 and #2 plays #3. It would not be (as) contraversial since there is no gatekeeping. You could even have the ranking be 1 through 8 in the previous round and look at the location of the top 4 teams. Furthest west is in the Rose Bowl and continue east until the furthest east team in the top 4 is in the Orange Bowl. Then 5 through 8 get assigned by their seeding (you all know how that goes).

What’s your idea?

2

And there would be no more conference/regional TV contracts. A network would get the contract and money split among all of the school.

3

Ah, the fatal flaw! Greed triumphs over most things, unfortunately, and it is producing super conferences by stripping the best schools from the second class citizen conferences. Starting next year, “The Big Ten” will consist of a whopping 18 universities after it cannibalizes “The Pac-12”, which will lose Washington, Oregon, USC and UCLA. They in turn will prey on a lesser conference, etc.

I can’t comment on your model exactly, but I can say I agree with you that, if we are moving to a true playoff format in determining a national champion, we need an organized cohesive system nationwide. How one could manage to navigate the political and economic rip tides created in the effort to organize such a system is something I personally would not want to attempt.

I believe to do this, the season would have to lengthened to accommodate a 16 team, four round format, otherwise you won’t be playing enough games to determine who should truly be in that group of 16.

4

The plan is missing the elements of promotion and relegation. No more protected cartels, please, American sports has enough of those already.

5

Of course, there will soon be only two in the Pac-12. And those two have already inked a scheduling agreement with the Mountain West.

Next year, the conferences will have:

ACC 17
Big 12 16
Big Ten 18
SEC 16

6

That’s the crux of the problem. There are multiple goals, not all of which work well with each other.

There’s the classic problem of the haves vs have-nots. For various historic reasons, there are currently only a relatively small number of schools that are going to be strongly competitive on an annual basis. They’re essentially semi-professional (and certainly used as a virtual development league) as it stands.

But we want smaller schools to be involved as well for a variety of reasons (mainly money but also to provide what are essentially practice games to the bigger schools). But those small schools want a seat at the table - which includes the opportunities to participate in the playoffs and in the paydays.

But also we want “student” athletes to be ‘amateurs’ so they don’t have to be paid much if at all.

The whole system shows cracks at the moment.

The whole FSU debate just highlights that. FSU is one of the ‘haves’.

If a Florida Atlantic U or a Directional Michigan U had run the table, while I think a few purist fans would have argued for their inclusion in the playoffs, most people would have been satisfied shuffling them off to a consolation bowl for their efforts. But for an FSU? It’s a national friggin’ debate about how they got jobbed.

There’s no way of ‘fixing’ college football until we define what we want out of college football. Do we want to include all the smaller, money-losing schools and give them a seat at the table? Do we instead want a smaller number of the semi-professional teams duking it out year after year and ditch the pretense that lower level (smaller, less marketable) schools actually have a shot?

I doubt there’s much widespread consensus even on these points. But until we decide what we actually want out of college football and how the money will get spread around, there’s no ‘fixing’ anything.

My preference: just go ahead and admit it’s about money and make an official 30-40 team semi-professional league ‘sponsored’ by various universities. Tradition be damned. It’s a hollow shell anyway at this point.

7

Oh so everyone know because I didn’t make it clear. This is not just “Comment on Saint Cad’s plan.” but add your own plan and ideas.

How would you do that?

8

I believe that athletic departments should be spun off from public universities and established as their own, private, for-profit entities. The universities can then license their brands to the new private teams for a fat profit. Universities can continue athletics as club sports so that students still have an opportunity to play and compete.

9

Eliminating the conference networks would help. I also think that limiting how much booster money can be spent on football would help as well. Say you have a limit of $5M / year for football and $5M / year for basketball, the rest of the money would have to be spent on other sports, facilities, scholarships, etc… If you are a booster, you are (theoretically) supporting your school and not just selected programs.

10

Good luck with that.

Boosters have always found ways to spread money around. And introducing the NIL has only provided more opportunities to do so.

Too much money at stake for the big time schools to agree to any such scheme which would reduce their own take.

That’s the flip side. This concept works for fans of college football. Which most people aren’t. Most people are a fan of their particular college football team. A fan of an Alabama or a USC? No way this works to their favor and they’d never agree to it.

Though I can see a lot of smaller regional schools liking this idea, I can see the big name schools just flat out ditching the NCAA and creating their own regional leagues…or ‘conferences’ if you will to replace it.

11

I think a small handful of things could alleviate the griping about college football.

  1. Have the NCAA require all conferences to engage in revenue sharing, similar to the way the SEC does. That way ALL your schools in a conference draw equally in TV revenues. I would say gate receipts should remain with the schools themselves.

  2. Acknowledge that the Power 5 (4?) are basically the highest level of collegiate football, and set up a separate playoff/ranking/etc… for them. It’s just absurd to go through the charade that the AAC is somehow equivalent to the Big-10 or SEC. And it’s unfair; if say… SMU went undefeated, they’d still be a big question mark for the current playoff format. Set up a Power 5 championship, a FCS championship, and so forth. Let SMU be the big dog in their own level, rather than a perpetual also-ran in the FCS.

  3. Rein in the NIL system in some fashion. Maybe pooled profits or something like that. I’m all for the players being compensated, but there’s something fundamentally wrong between some offensive lineman getting zilch because he’s a big chubby bearded goon, and Livvy Dunne making millions because she’s a very attractive blonde gymnast. It has nothing to do with their talent, value to their sports, or risk that they’re assuming, which was a lot of the argument for NIL in the first place. I feel like the NIL money will concentrate around star “skill” position players, and good looking female athletes. Which leaves the ugly and/or unsexy positions out in the cold.

  4. Expand the playoff (they’re already doing this) A four team playoff is too few, when we have multiple teams that are for all intents and purposes equally qualified, and our decision making process is to crowdsource it among sportswriters. The 12 team playoff will still be contentious for the bottom few positions, but this year, it would be around whether Louisville, OU, LSU, Notre Dame, or SMU get the 11th and 12th spots, instead of whether it’s FSU, Alabama, UT, or Georgia.

I think those four things would alleviate a lot of the discontent. I feel like the transfer portal still needs some tweaking, but I’m not sure where or how to go about that.

12

Paying athletes was a massive mistake and we’ll never recover from it. There’s no reasonable way to equitably share the money. The entire Booster model is screwed up on every level and should be banned, but unfortunately, it’s impossible to police. This will necessarily lead to a consolidation and an eventual culling of programs that simply can’t afford to play the game. Even a B1G and SEC that grow to 24 teams each over time probably can’t sustain paying ever growing NIL money to that many players on that many teams. If Alabama’s payroll is 20x Vanderbilt’s, what the hell is even the point of putting them in the same conference.

Also, relegation is almost certainly a non-starter. The B1G and SEC members aren’t going to accept a scheme where the legacy members who have been part of it for 100 years get booted after a bad season. Alumni, boosters, students, TV networks and administrators will freak. No one ever said that it was supposed to be egalitarian, I don’t know why we like to pretend otherwise.

13

I gue$$ they have their rea$on$

14

Start paying the players and everything will work out.

15

Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about point shaving or something.

16

You mean, “the way it used to be, when the NCAA controlled every team’s TV rights” - before the Supreme Court shut that down. That’s how conferences got to make their own deals with TV networks, and that’s not going away any time soon.

There’s a reason the NCAA is not in charge of a football playoff; it would be in charge of the TV money - and I am convinced that, after seeing what it did with the men’s basketball money (more specifically, what it did not do, which is, give pretty much all of it to the best basketball schools), the Power 5 schools aren’t about to let it get its hands on the football playoff TV money either.

I do support “regionalizing” Division I for sports besides football and men’s basketball. The new-look ACC is going to send Duke, North Carolina, and North Carolina State out west to play Cal and Stanford (and maybe throw in UC-Davis as well)…in field hockey. Well, that, and baseball, softball, track & field, swimming & diving, and tennis.

However, I go one step further, and regionalize the conferences - for example, a Northern California conference consists of Cal, Stanford, San Jose State, Santa Clara, San Francisco, St. Mary’s, Pacific, UC-Davis, Sacramento State, and Fresno State; maybe throw in Nevada (Reno) and Cal State Bakersfield while you’re at it.

17

Only in that, after pretty much every school’s female athletes sue for the Title IX violations this will cause, the schools probably won’t have enough money left for football programs.

“But the football team brings in more money!”
Stateaments like that are kinda sorta the entire reason Title IX exists. You can pay your “football employees” more; just make sure that about half of them are women. (Why, yes, that does include cheerleaders, now doesn’t it?)

“The NBA gets away with paying more to its athletes than the WNBA does.”
Even if it was a school (“Title IX” refers to some education code), the NBA doesn’t accept federal funding, so it would not be subject to Title IX.

18

No… I don’t mean promotion/relegation like European soccer. I just mean that they should further subdivide the FCS into the Power conferences, and the rest, with separate national titles.

I agree about the NIL stuff. I feel like they could have done it more collectively- maybe by program or school with all players getting an equal cut, rather than today’s Wild West approach.

19

This. There’s nothing wrong or unfair with acknowledging the gap in the level between Michigan, Alabama, Ohio State, Texas, and so on vs. SMU, directional Michigan, Louisiana U’Pickem etc. Split them up, with each group having around 60 or so teams rather than one big grouping where the underdogs have no chance, and will be derided as having “just gotten lucky” if they do manage to sneak in every so often in a system with expanded playoffs.

20

Right- there’s a clear division already between the Power 5 conferences and the rest of the FCS conferences.

Where it gets weird is that you have some Power 5 schools that are, at least in football, more like the rest of the FCS (Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, etc…), and some of the other conferences have a handful of schools that are probably lower-mid tier Power 5 strength (SMU and Notre Dame come to mind)