It’s sort of happened already except only half of the equation is in place. Teams like Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Washington, and Oregon get promoted while the likes of Vanderbilt and Illinois don’t get relegated. Hence the bloated SEC and Big 10.
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Didn’t one of the major pro leagues - I want to say the NFL - suggest full revenue sharing at one point, and three teams, including Dallas, threatened to leave the league if that happened? I expect something similar. The minute the NCAA says, “Well, in that case, you’re out of the NCAA,” you might as well turn the NCAA into NAIA-II, as if one major school leaves, most of the others follow out of fear that they won’t be able to win a “true” national championship in the major sports.
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This may already be happening. There is supposed to be legislation introduced at the upcoming NCAA Convention that will have a separate Division I football subdivision that will allow the players to be paid. This opens the door for the teams left in FBS to have their own playoff.
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This raises more legal issues.
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There will always be arguments over the “last team in”, even in the 68-team basketball tournaments.
I’m not at all clear what you are saying there. I get the idea that you think fixing college football would be more complicated than just paying the players, but I’m not understanding what Title IX has to do with it or who you are quoting on the subject.
So, the last few posts get to the heart of it.
There’s no real way to “fix” this. The solution is to admit there is no solution and to divvy things up differently (with a vastly smaller pool of school for that top title most likely). There’s still going to be controversy about what teams get to be in the club or not and how they can claim to be a ‘national champion’ if most of the schools are left out.
These issues were known literally 100 years ago which is why teams didn’t actually play for ‘the’ title until the last few decades - because most reasonable people realized there was no good way to satisfy all stakeholders. And the process of choosing which teams do that has been riddled with arguments and disagreements the entire time.
I haven’t even seen the problem defined. Once we do that, we can discuss fixing it.
There are multiple problems with multiple solutions, depending on whether you are a big college, a small college, a football player, a college athlete in a different sport, a fan of a small school, a fan of a big school, and fan of football in general, a TV station, sponsors, bowl committees, host cities, etc. A solution to one problem may do nothing for another problem, or may make it worse.
Sure. But ultimately it seems to come down to these two questions.
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Which team is the best team in the country this season?
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Do we care more about determining which team is the best (in which case we should limit the size of the playoff field to those teams that have a legitimate argument for being that team), or about crowning a champion (in which case having a larger field would make sense)?
The problem, as I see it, is in the weird connection between a major money-generating sport and institutions of higher learning. You’d never in a million years design the system this way, but that’s how it’s evolved, and untangling the money and power to create some sort of more equitable system just isn’t possible. For schools like Alabama and Oklahoma, their football teams’ success is a big part of their overall brand, not to mention their ongoing revenue streams.
We’re already on our way to a two-conference ultra-league of maybe 50 teams where Michigan need no longer support Northwestern, nor Alabama Vanderbilt.
I think it’s impossible to determine which team is “best.” You can crown a champion, of course. Is the winner of the World Series the “best” team in the MLB each year, or the one that got hot at the right time? Opinions vary. It gives sports fans something to talk about. I remember the rankings before we had CFB playoffs. Good conversations were had. Some suggested we try to have it decided by a playoff system. Now we have different conversations. Next year will be different again. I’ve come to the conclusion that college football doesn’t need a champion, each conference will have a champ, and we can all just fight about which team we think is best.
There is no power 5 anymore, and really hasn’t been for a while. It’s the Power 2: Big 10 and SEC that have the clear revenue advantage.
Then you might claim there’s set of 2.25 conferences in the next tier: Big 12, ACC, and Pac-2.
Next is a bit of a wash with MAC, AAC, C-USA, Sunbelt, Mountain West, etc.
Further down is now FCS.
Something else to make clear: on the field performance has little to do with getting “promoted” to this point.
Preventing athletes from making money, whether it be from the schools themselves or from outside sources, is a non-starter. Because it violates United States law.
If the schools wish to have any rules that negate the growing system of free agency, they will have to negotiate in good faith with the players. The lawsuits are only ramping up over time and it’s clear that the days of the schools exercising unilateral control are over.
The recent spate of realignment proves that the schools don’t give a flying fig about “legacy” conference members. Time to reorganize logically around geography and strength of program, with an acknowledgement that there is a huge amount of competitive imbalance. Thirty point spreads in conference games are an affront to everyone who values competition.
Should there then be eligibility rules at all? Should someone be able to play college football for 10+ years? Why not?
These two sentences seem to contradict each other.
What’s the major objection to non-regional conferences other than history and travel expenses? (if the teams don’t care why should we?)
I’ve contended that College Football was a substantially better product when teams and the media were primarily concerned with the conference championships. There were of course 30 point spreads then as well, but I never viewed that as an intrinsic problem. I also never really minded that Nebraska, Michigan, Miami, Florida State and Oklahoma didn’t necessarily play each other to settle which was the “best”.
You basically had a Midwest champ. A Southeast champ. A Southwest champ and a Western champ. It worked just fine. Rivalries were strong and plentiful.
This entire realignment I think could effectively return us to something close to that, albeit less regional. If conferences sever themselves from the obsession with arbitrary rankings and seedings we might get to a more rational product.
With a handful of bowl games to pit these champs against each other. Back in the day, the Rose Bowl produced an excellent game each New Year’s Day.
Once the bowls were done, the AP voted, and the season ended with one team with bragging rights.
My interest in college football took a huge hit when the traditional Big Ten v Pac-10 matchup in the Rose Bowl was diluted and eventually destroyed. Going to the Rose Bowl mattered, there were 20 teams every season with that as their one and only goal.
Part of me thinks that had there only been an even number of power conferences back then we might not have destroyed it.
I don’t know if anyone has ever suggested an unlimited number of years of eligibility but it might be up for debate in the future.
Here’s an interesting scenario along those lines: basketball player leaves for the NBA after a year or two, plays six years, is cut and unable to land another roster spot, then decides to return to school to procure a degree and decides to play a little varsity ball while he’s there.
Would schools be able to deny him eligibility? He has years of eligibility remaining and let’s assume he maintains the academic requirements.
Others have suggested not even making them be students at all. Personally I think that’s a terrible idea, but the more the sport becomes a pay for play endeavor the more that argument makes sense.
Like NIL it will be one of those things that feels “just” but ultimately spoils one of the remaining things that makes it special.
Acknowledging competitive imbalances does not mean that we should accommodate them as the norm. I’d rather see Michigan playing a steady diet of Top 20 teams than watch them beat up on the 11 teams not named Ohio State and Penn State.
It was once argued to me that not having cupcakes on the schedule to guarantee X number of wins would be disastrous for some programs and I’ve often wondered why that would be.