The start of college football season is days away, and college sports are erupting in chaos again. NIL has a significant impact on all college athletes and more so with football players.
Texas and Oklahoma want to jump to the SEC, hoping to get a more significant share of the football revenue pie. In response, the ACC, Big 10, and Pac 12 discussed schedule and TV contract consolidation.
Where does that leave Big 12, who has ten schools and could be down to 8? Will Norte Dame stay independent or join the ACC as a football member? Norte Dame still has a good NBC football contract with money they prefer not to share.
Will Vanderbilt, Kansas, and Rutgers ever field competitive football teams? They take advantage of their conference revenue share and field competitive teams in other sport. They don’t seem to have a desire to win at football.
The College Football Playoff is talking of expanding to 12 teams. With that number of teams, some schools will have an unfair advantage of getting byes; a school may end up playing as many as 17 games, leading to more injury opportunities. Expanding the playoffs makes the regular season less critical, and bowl games will lose status.
Is it time to separate football from the typical conference scheduling alliances? My idea is for football only. The current conference alignments for all other sports are working well.
In my book, “Go for 25”, available on Amazon, I detailed a plan to have a 64 school top tier for football, breaking into eight eight-team groups. An eight-school playoff would include only the winner of each group.
Groups would have geographical associations but would not be conference restricted. The SEC could have one or more schools in each of the eight groups.
I detailed a relegation and promotion scheme to allow up-and-coming schools to be included in the 64 team tier, dropping the underperforming schools. And, schools winning a bowl game are promoted.
The top schools in each group were included in the playoff, and the bottom three schools played a bowl game to keep their place in the top tier.
That left 32 schools with a meaningless bowl game. I could add an incentive for these 32 schools. Win your bowl game, and you can choose a new group for the following year. Lose and stay with your current group. So a school would not need to be stuck behind Alabama or Clemson forever.
Just a dream and things I think about during long runs. It stops me from yelling, “get off my lawn.”