O’s Thoughts On Realignment

What up everyone? Welcome to the latest episode of O’s Thoughts. If you have read my earlier submissions in this series, you probably have a pretty good idea that I am a very traditional person and I don’t like change a whole lot. Yeah, that is true. When it comes to college conference alignments, that remains the case. Oh, how I pine for the days when conferences were ten teams, they all were geographically close, and you played all other nine teams each year in football and twice in basketball. I wish those days would come back, and the Rose Bowl would always be the Big Ten champion versus the Pac Ten champion.

But I have come to accept that those days are gone and will never return. And in that spirit, I would like to present my idea for conference realignment. It is a subject that has come up a lot in the last couple of weeks with the SEC and B1G both talking about how they will structure their schedules once they each welcome two new members in 2024. This is actually something I first wrote nearly two years ago when the news first came out about a couple of California schools joining the Big Ten. I even drafted a letter and mailed it to the NCAA offices. Naturally, I never heard back.

Let me start by saying that this idea was crafted with college football in mind, as that is the highest revenue sport in the college ranks. There would certainly be a way to tweak it and make it apply to basketball as well. My proposal goes against my natural resistance to change and completely swings for the fences. I say if we are going to keep growing the conferences, then let’s really go for it. In fact, let’s go a step further and stop calling them conferences. This is bigger. We are going to have regions and there will be only four of them for the highest level of college football. Unlike college hoops’ NCAA Tournament, these four regions will actually follow the geographic locations of these schools. In my model, we will have four regions of twenty teams. I have divided them as follows:

MIDWEST:

MICHIGAN STATE

OHIO STATE

INDIANA

PURDUE

ILLINOIS

IOWA

WISCONSIN

MINNESOTA

NORTHWESTERN

PENN STATE

NEBRASKA

PITTSBURGH

CINCINNATI

OHIO

IOWA STATE

NOTRE DAME

KANSAS

KANSAS ST

MISSOURI

MICHIGAN

SOUTH:

FLORIDA

FLORIDA STATE

AUBURN

ALABAMA

MISSISSIPPI

MISSISSIPPI STATE

LSU

TEXAS

TEXAS A&M

BAYLOR

TCU

TEXAS TECH

OKLAHOMA

OKLAHOMA STATE

ARKANSAS

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE

VANDERBILT

HOUSTON

MIAMI

EAST:

CLEMSON

SOUTH CAROLINA

NORTH CAROLINA

NORTH CAROLINA STATE

DUKE

WAKE FOREST

VIRGINIA

VIRGINIA TECH

WEST VIRGINIA

MARSHALL

MEMPHIS

LOUISVILLE

UCONN

MARYLAND

RUTGERS

BOSTON COLLEGE

GEORGIA TECH

ARMY

NAVY

GEORGIA

WEST:

WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON STATE

OREGON

OREGON STATE

CAL

STANFORD

USC

UCLA

ARIZONA

ARIZONA STATE

SAN DIEGO STATE

FRESNO STATE

BOISE STATE

BYU

NEW MEXICO

NEW MEXICO STATE

UTAH

UTAH STATE

COLORADO STATE

AIR FORCE

These four regions consist of all the teams currently in the Power Five conferences plus some from the Group of Five, as many needed to make each region have twenty teams. In terms of scheduling, I propose a 13-game schedule. Each team will play ten games against regional opponents and 3 games against teams from other regions. The non-region games will consist of one opponent from each of the other three regions, thus ensuring that every team at the top level will play every other team in a twenty-year cycle (except for a possible wrinkle coming a little bit later in this article). For the ten in-region games, I propose assigning each team its one “rival” that it will play annually, and then playing half of the other 18 teams every other year. This means that in a four-year cycle, you play each team in your region twice, once at home and once on the road, with the exception of your rival who you play each year.

The next step in this model is creating the College Football Playoff. For this, I am proposing an eight-team playoff with exactly two teams from each region. We can do away with the conference (regional) championship games, and just take a regular season winner and runner-up from each. With a thirteen-game regular season, ten in-region, it should be fairly easy to solve any tiebreaker scenarios. So the top two from each region go to the playoff for a three-round tournament. This means that the two teams that play in the championship game will have played a total of sixteen games over the whole campaign, only one more than the current scenario. I think when the CFP does expand to twelve teams (assuming they don’t adopt my proposal first) that some teams would actually have the potential to play seventeen games, assuming they play in a conference championship game and have to go through four rounds of the playoff.

So that is the basics of my proposal. One possible alternative would be if there is resistance to the thirteen-game regular season. In that case, we could shrink each region to nineteen teams (I will leave it to you to decide who gets relegated from each), remove the annual “rival” game, and just play half of each of the 18 teams every other year. Including the three non-region games, the regular season would remain at twelve games just like the current system. The playoff in this version could stay the same as it was in my thirteen-game schedule proposal.

Now, remember when I said there is a little wrinkle to my plan? Here is where I get really crazy. I am sure some of you may have read my plan up to this point and asked yourselves, “Hey, what about all the other Group of Five teams and the FCS teams?” Well, don’t worry. I did not forget about them. I want to take a page out of European soccer for this and create a second tier of four regions comprising the remainder of what currently makes up the FBS and probably dipping into the FCS. We could have four regions which, more or less, follow the same borders as the upper four regions. At the end of each season, the team at the bottom of each region’s standings (or maybe the bottom two) would get relegated to the second tier for the following season, and the champion of each second-tier region (or top two) would get promoted to the upper level. I like this for the same reason the European fans like it; it keeps all teams having something to play for even once they are mathematically eliminated from making the playoffs (or being bowl eligible). I know this is a fantasy most likely, as there would be enormous resistance to the possibility of being relegated and having to play an entire season against a lower level of opponent. But it would be fun to see the reaction of, for example, Nebraska fans losing their mind when they get dropped down to the second tier.

So that is that. I hope you all enjoyed reading this. Obviously, it is never going to happen, unless of course you all think this is the greatest idea ever, and you all start a petition and get enough signatures that the U.S. Congress decides to make a bill of it and force the NCAA to adopt this. Let’s hear what you think about this. What tweaks would you make to my plan? Or do you have a completely different plan that is even better?

Oh, one more thing, on a completely unrelated note. Hey Dersh! you wrote in the comments of last week’s open thread that I went to high school with your sister-in-law. I want to know who that is. If everyone promises not to look her up on Facebook, will you comment to tell me her name? Thank you.