This is a spin off on the thread on Texas and Oklahoma leaving the Big XII for the SEC. There’s already talk of other big name teams wanting to join the SEC. Florida State, Clemson, Ohio State, and Michigan have been mentioned. That’s certainly one potential outcome, but I could see others as well. What do you all think would make for the best or most interesting outcome? I leave it up to you to define best and most interesting.
I think ending up with three super conferences would be an interesting outcome. Rather than Clemson and Florida State going to the SEC, they could join the Big 10, perhaps bringing along Norte Dame (yes I know they aren’t formally in the ACC), Miami, North Carolina, Virginia Tech, Duke, and / or Georgia Tech. The PAC 12 could expand with Texas Tech, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, TCU, and / or Baylor. This would leave the PAC 12 with fewer big name teams, but geographically they would cover the whole western half of the country to make up for that.
What would you all do if you were the ones making the decisions?
I think I’d try and make it into four 16 team conferences centered around the SEC, ACC, Pac-12 and Big-10. With current conference sizes, that leaves 7 slots (1 in the ACC, 2 in the Big 10, 4 in the Pac-12).
Having a 64 team college major league would allow for a ready-made 4, 8, or 16 team playoff by simply having the best one, two or four from each conference make the playoffs each year. No more of this ranking nonsense by sportswriters.
I’d think the six best remaining Big-12 teams are a lock (Kansas (for basketball), Baylor, Texas Tech, TCU, West Virginia, and Oklahoma State ) would be locks, and the the last spot would somehow be determined between the best teams of the Group of 5, the remaining Big-12 teams, and the few independents out there.
I have no idea how that might work though; is BYU a better choice than Iowa State? Is University of Houston better or worse than either? What about Cincinnati? Memphis? Kansas State?
I don’t like the idea of each conference only being able to send, say, 4 teams to the playoffs because that would unfairly reward weak conferences and penalize strong conferences. I’d still like the current 12-team playoff system and let things more or less stand as is. As for the current Big-12 (which ought to be called the Big 8,) it can just disband entirely.
I’d like to see the SEC add Clemson (although it would never happen) and ditch Vanderbilt and Kentucky (although I know they are valuable for basketball purposes.)
I fully agree with this. UCF and Boise State have good years, they go to a Power 5 conference. Vanderbilt and South Carolina have their 2-10 year? Down to non Power 5.
Vanderbilt’s value is in the fact that they are a private school. Intra-Conference communications between all the schools can’t be FOI’d due to the private party status.
I don’t believe that the presence of a private school in the conference is necessary to shield communications from FOIA requests. The conference itself is a private entity, so any communications via a platform owned by the conference would be immune to FOIA. Which is exactly what the Big Ten schools did to avoid disclosure regarding their communications on how to handle the pandemic last year.
Maybe it is apocryphal. I’ve always heard that the reason conferences (especially the P5) all have private Universities is because that is what allows them, along with the NCAA, to consider themselves a private entity.
“Super conferences” are not conferences at all. The B1G and SEC are already on the edge of that; going to 16 teams or more just makes it worse. When you don’t see a conference mate play at your stadium except only once every six seasons or so, can you really say it’s a “conference”?
The idea of going to these monster conferences goes against everything college football should be. That isn’t to say it won’t happen - boatloads of cash is quite a motivator - but we shouldn’t be happy about it. My personal preference, which I openly admit will never happen, would be a return to geographical groupings of college teams, paired with an expanded playoff system so the champion of each geographical area would be included. Keep the history of regional rivalries alive, that’s a huge part of college football. Don’t make it so traditional rivals like Texas/TAMU or USC/UCLA or Pitt/Penn State don’t ever play each other except once in a blue moon (yeah, I know the ship has sailed on a couple of those).
Which leads me to another thing: No, “super conferences” shouldn’t get 3, 4, or more selections into any playoff. The idea should be a “playoff of champions” - if you can’t even win your division, let alone your conference, what gives you the idea you “deserve” to be called the best team in the country? And yes, I mean you, SEC - when you have a schedule that can let you dodge the toughest teams in the other division, plus play a couple of FCS patsies (one if the middle of conference play, for crying out loud), that seems like a convenient way for you to brag “it just means more” and “our conference is so far ahead of the rest of you bums.”
This really depends on what your definitions of “best” are. Is it just performance on the field? If so, Iowa State ought to be at least mentioned here (they’ve beat OU twice since 2017; Texas and Okie State can’t say that - plus the Cyclones are almost certain to be in the preseason Top 15 this year). If you’re talking about academic institution-wise - which the B1G and PAC-12 still at least pay lip service to - I don’t know about Baylor, West Virginia, and maybe Texas Tech.
But yeah, I know for the purposes of this discussion, athletic-team performance is really all that matters.
Don’t @ me with the history of the playoff system where teams that didn’t win their conference ended up winning the CFP - I know that can happen, in single-elimination playoffs sometimes things work out that way - my idea would be that conference championships would essentially be the “first round” of the playoff. Prove you can win your conference, and then you get a chance to be national champion. Finish behind someone else in your conference, well, you just proved you’re not even the best in the SEC, thanks, try again next year.
I was actually looking at more than just football… Baylor’s not bad at football, but they just won the Natl. Championship in basketball. They’re also not a terrible academic school either- very highly regarded law school for one thing. TCU has perennially good baseball teams, for example.
I’ve never understood what academics have to do with what athletic conference a school is in. AFAIK, there’s not any kind of money sharing or anything like that, and it doesn’t mean that if you’re in a Power 5 conference that you’re academically anything special- plenty of highly regarded schools are in Conference USA and the AAC - Rice, University of Houston, and the service academies come to mind. And the reverse is true; there are plenty of Power 5 schools that are academically middling or worse, but powerful sports-wise. LSU and Alabama come to mind in fact.
Someone did a study of schools’ athletic revenues as a percentage of total revenues a few years back and the two you mentioned, LSU and Alabama, were among the highest in that category. Make of that what you will.
It’d be fun to see the major conference also-rans defecting to or creating less prestigious conferences where they still had a chance to win a significant number of games and compete for championships. Let the football giants beat each others’ brains out, or better yet lose players to minor pro leagues where they could be salaried and stop pretending they’re students interested in an education.
Such a conference realignment would necessitate the smaller schools making less money and placing diminished emphasis on athletics, but it would be better for most players and fans.
I actually saw a discussion yesterday musing about this type of possibility, considering the eventual arrival of schools funneling money directly to players - perhaps re-dividing the football schools into something like:
D-1: scholarship plus some kind of financial payment
D-2: scholarship only
D-3: non-scholarship
Obviously this new “top division” would essentially just be an NFL minor league, but if that’s where the powers want to go, fine, I guess. The scholarship-only level would be much more like what college football used to be maybe 60 or 70 years ago, and that would be perfectly fine for college sports … but fan interest, TV appearances and athletic department budgets would be far, far less than even the MWC or Conference USA sees now.
I don’t see any outcome other than the big football powers consolidating even more of the college football pie, at the expense of the schools they don’t see as “valuable.” Which is really a shame, because when Ohio State or Alabama or Texas wins a game, somebody has to lose, too.
I’d like smaller conferences. Twelve teams is the practical limit. When you go to 14 or even more so to 16 teams, it no longer feels like a conference. It feels like two conferences with an agreement to play each other in a championship game plus occasional crossover games. And basketball is ruined because you can’t play anything close to a double-round-robin schedule.
But the trend is all toward bigger and bigger conferences, to maximize clout in negotiating TV contracts. Which is kind of perverse, because until 1983 they had the ultimate clout–the NCAA negotiated one contract on behalf of all of college football. And everybody said, OMG, that’s so stupid (and illegal); they’re leaving so much money on the table. Let each conference do its own thing and they’ll get so much more. And now 40 years later they’re consolidating and re-consolidating and might not stop until they’ve put a national Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Bump said “I think I’d try and make it into four 16 team conferences centered around the SEC, ACC, Pac-12 and Big-10. With current conference sizes, that leaves 7 slots (1 in the ACC, 2 in the Big 10, 4 in the Pac-12).”
I heard a radio guy talking about how many “slots” each of the other conferences have, and I don’t get why he felt like 16 is some magical best number of teams for a conference. The SEC isn’t adding Texas and Oklahoma just to be the first to 16. They’re taking them because they can.
But, yeah, theoretically, you could have 4 Power conferences, each has a conference championship game which is essentially a quarterfinal, then you have a 4-team playoff.
You could actually just have the Rose Bowl go back to being the Big North champ vs. the Pac x champ, and have the Sugar Bowl be SEC champ vs. ACC champ, and those 2 games are your semifinals. Then one more game ~10 days later.
My idea will never happen, but the fantasy ideal would be seven conferences of 10 teams each, arranged for geographical/rivalry purposes. You play everybody in your conference, every year - that’s 9 games, leaving 3 non-conference spots. (That also allows for a double-round robin in basketball for everybody.) The two top teams in each conference play for the conference championship, those champions advance to the playoffs (with one at-large team, to allow for unexpected surprise teams).
That’d be my ultimate realignment. I know that will never, ever happen.
It’s funny because – aside of the playoff – this is exactly what we had before conferences started to expand in the 90s. A ten member SEC, Big Ten was actually ten, nine member ACC, PAC-12 was the PAC-10, etc.