Bringing some sensibility to the FBS
It's time.
Enough of the craziness.
Northern Illinois AD Sean Frazier said so not so long ago (https://www.landof10.com/big-ten/group-of-5-officials-consider-holding-…) that the Group of 5 conferences need to have their own playoff, and I agree.
Time for the FBS to split in to two 64 team subdivisions. We'll just simply call them FBS1 and FBS2.
Time for each to have their own playoff and bowl games (if FBS2 finds those sustainable).
Time for FBS1 teams to play only other FBS1 teams, and FBS2 teams to play only FBS2 teams.
And time to make the playoff legitimate.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
So what needs to change?
We'll start by giving FBS1 a makeover. From five conferences down to four - but we'll reduce complexity in scheduling.
How could that work? By splitting each conference in to two stand alone leagues.
For simplicity, we'll just use Midwest, Pacific, Southeast, and Atlantic.
As an example: within the Midwest, we can have a Lakes League with eight teams, and a Plains League with eight teams.
Lakes: Michigan, OSU, PSU, MSU, Indiana, Purdue, Penn St, Notre Dame, Northwestern.
Plains: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas St, Kansas.
Still 12 games. Seven against your league - those are what count for the league championship (and beating out seven other teams is easier than 13, 14, or 15 other teams). Two against the other league in your conference (so you'll play all eight once each four years), and one game against a team from each of the other three conferences (you'll play all of them in 16 years, and then can flip the home/away sites in the next 16 years).
What about 7 home games? Isn't it important for a lot of FBS1 schools to have seven home games? Sure - add a pre-season game against an FBS2 school (home game for FBS1, and nice payout for FBS2).
Let's say this starts in 2020. The preseason game would be on the weekend of August 22nd. Regular season starts August 29th weekend, and ends by the weekend of November 21st (before Thanksgiving). That still allows for a bye week for each team.
No college games on Thanksgiving weekend?! How can that be!!!? Not to worry: how about games that mean something on Thanksgiving weekend? PLAYOFFS!! Eight games, 16 teams. Four Friday. Four Saturday. All at Campus sites. Didn't make the playoff? Enjoy the long weekend with your family. As for the remaining teams, each league champ, plus eight at-large teams - total of 16 (max of six teams in any one conference) are continuing to play in hopes of winning the National Championship).
The next weekend, in what used to be the Conference Championship sites (we'll say Indianapolis, Charlotte, Atlanta and San Francisco just for the sake of argument), the remaining eight teams will play. The four highest remaining seeds play as close to home as possible. One Friday night game (Dec 4), and three on Saturday (Dec 5).
After that, it all unfolds as it does now, with a small exception. Semi-finals (at major Bowl sites) and other bowl matchups are announced Sunday, December 5th. I would recommend limiting FBS1 bowls to a max of 18 (let the bidding begin), so as not to water them down too much. The exception I mentioned would be that the Semi-Final games are the last two games played on New Year's Day, and there are no games after that, except the National Championship.
Overall - the National Champion would play one more regular season/playoff game than now. Not too bad.
--------------------------------------------------
TV Rights? Sure - the Midwest keeps BTN/ESPN. The Pacific keeps PTN/FOX. The Atlantic keeps ESPN and adds NBC. The Southeast keeps ESPN/CBS. No one is left out in the cold.
---------------------------------------------------
Here's a sample of what the other three conferences could look like (set up to make geographic sense):
Why do people keep doing this? It's never, ever going to happen. Booting schools out and dismantling conferences to get to some perfect number - just stop.
Another division in CFB? That might just happen.
Really not trying to penalize teams by "booting them"; but the FBS as a whole right now is very close to 128 teams, so 64 each is not that much of a stretch.
You have to know that no Power 5 school would voluntarily leave for a lower level. It's simply ridiculous with the money coming in today. BYU wouldn't either, nor would schools like Houston and Cincinnati.
Um, none of those three schools have ever been in a Power 5 conference...
(If you include Notre Dame as a "Power 5" team, and if I'm counting right, there are 65 teams that would currently qualify as Power 5. I find it hard to argue when you say none would want to leave - I wish I had a good plan for 65 teams. 65 is divisble by 13, but that doesn't help much either...5 conferences, 13 teams, but what then? That still seems like too many teams without splitting it further.)
Regardless, I'd still love to see a workable system (mine may need tweaking, but I'd love to hear other suggestions) with a 16 team playoff that started on Thanksgiving weekend. And that athletes may now follow what McCaffrey and Fournette did this past season, and not help their teams in bowl games, is very frustrating from a fan standpoint - plus it doesn't help the bowl system much.
to the Power 5 schools? I thought it was. Point is, you are trying to force schools to leave the level of football with all the $$$ and prestige because you are intent on having 64 teams. That is never ever going to happen. You are ignoring reality while playing around with names and numbers.
You don't need some perfect number to have a workable system.
Add in promotion and relegation. Be the bottom team in your conference and now you have to play a playoff with the top team in the corresponding FBS2 conference. Money problems solved and more drama at the end of the season.
(This has just as much of a chance of happening as a P5 school willingly moving down to a "lower" level)
I agree that this will never happen.
But if it did, it wouldn't be a matter of a school having to "voluntarily" leave for a lower level. It would be something done by the big-time schools that leaves the other schools behind. If whatever cadre of schools formed the top half of D-1 decided that Houston, or Cincinnati, or BYU had to be left out because they weren't profitable enough, there wouldn't be anything that school could do about it.
lesser conference schools were not shut out of the BCS? There would be hell to pay if the bigger schools start forcing schools out of the playoffs.
One could've said that about a college football playoff a few decades ago. Some might have thought that never would happen either.
Whether it actually happens or not, the current conference system is a mess (14/15 teams - really? The NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB divisions don't even come close to that number, and certainly don't have a conference championship after playing all the regular season games to determine the champ *before* the playoffs).
It's the offseason and there hasn't been a diary in a week, so it's not like thnis is clogging the board and pushing down pertinent stuff.
But this is a realignment snowflake. The "drop to 4 power conferences" take has been around in various forms for years. It's not happening. There are five power conferences and the teams in them want to be there.
I'm not a fan of larger playoffs, but a larger playoff has a much, much higher chance of taking place than this. I mean, I'm not unsympathetic--I like the idea that the playoff is limited to 4 conference champions, it's pretty clean--but it's not happening. The only scenario in which the number of power conferences reduces is if one conference (the Big 12) disintegrates.
It's not happening.
I was kind of hoping it was posted on the board because of the hilarious comments it would have genereated.
I think it's entirely possible thg Big12 implodes. They sure are looking like the loser in the conference wars.
A few years ago, many thought the ACC was in trouble - now they're clearly ahead of the Big 12, and seem about as solid as the other 3 power conferences. OTOH, the Big 12 is one more big defection from disaster, and neither Oklahoma nor Texas seem terribly committed.
Things change, of course. If they add a couple of teams and fortunes on the field shift a bit, the whole picture could look much different.
One error that would probably significantly alter your projection - you have 9 teams in our (Lakes) division.
Logical move would be to shift PSU to the Northeast, and dump Rutgers. As projected, the NE would certainly benefit (from a competitive standpoint) from exchanging PSU for Rutgers.
Cute exercise, but will never happen.
Also, why are we continuing to try to fit college sports into a professional model? It just can't work. The NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA are structured in a logical way because teams in those leagues don't exist without the leagues themselves, so the incentives are there for them to make cohesive, well-defined divisions, playoff systems, etc.
College teams, even if they are now big business, are still attached to universities. The NCAA needs the colleges more than the colleges need the NCAA, so you have nearly 128 independent entities who all have their own interests and who can't just be rounded up and plopped down into a set system. Sure, the other universities could theoretically just "leave them" if they don't cooperate, but that would mean further empowering a central structure (the NCAA), which necessarily takes away autonomy from the schools themselves.
I.e., this is a mental exercise. Nothing more.
Conferences are voluntary associations, period. You can't move teams out of conferences if they don't want to leave, and you can't make teams join conferences that they don't want to join.
Like I've said for a long time: Conference alignment is a chaotic system. Bringing order to it, as all the realignment snowflakes attempt to do, requires a single powerful force to make it happen. That force doesn't exist.
Occasionally I've seen someone argue that that force is "the money." As if the money is interested in making things happen just the way the snowflake-makers want it to, never mind the massive pile of evidence the past decade that money actually makes things more chaotic, not less.
"Show me the money".
Unless a system can enrich all participant simulteneously, it has no chance of being accepted by NCAA football committee.
This plan is like a plan to split up the U.S. states by straight lines of equal population. It makes sense from an extremly birds-eye view but ignores the whole point of having states in the first place.
I think there should be a minor league option for football players. Let's face it, big time college football has nothing to do with academics.
tldr: this whole thing. Still felt the need to post. idk why. apologies.
Look, the OP knows this is not happening. We all know it. But it's still fun to think about.
I like this concept and would support it if I was in charge. To that end, no one ever in the history of man laid out a plan that everyone 100% supported on every piece of it. This come close enough to a good plan that it would get my vote.
Weighing in on this more direclty, I'd like to see a relegation/promotion system put in place for the bottom X teams and top X teams of FBS1 and FBS2, respectively. That would rock.
I want fifty million dollars, and I think I'm more likely to get my wish than you.
BCU? The fuck is BCU?
BC as in Boston College?
Any plan that takes Rutgers out of our league is a non-starter in my opinion.
While I applaud the plan, in theory it could work, but what about non-conference rivalries?
Clemson vs South Carolina
Iowa vs Iowa State
Georgia vs Georgia Tech
Notre Dame vs Stanford
Notre Dame vs USC
Florida vs Florida State
Kansas vs Mizzou
Cincinnati vs Louisville
Since according to your plan you play only one team from the other three conferences each year some of these teams would only play their rival once every 16 years and Cincinnati would never play Louisville other than maybe in meaningless exhibition. This takes away the very spirit of CFB, rivalries that have been bred over decades and even a century for some. Tradition is what CFB is and should be about.
That is definitely a negative...