What if the Pac-12 and Mountain West changed the way college conferences operate by borrowing an idea from European soccer leagues?
What if the Pac-12 and Mountain West changed the way college conferences operate by borrowing an idea from European soccer leagues?
One of my pet peeves is the idea that Premier-League style “X up, X down” annual promotion could ever work in CFB. Even with the portal, that’s just not how rosters full of 18-23 year olds (plus Stetson Bennett) work. The kind of lower division team that makes a splash probably has a lot of seniors, and often see a dropoff the next year. On the other side of the coin, many down years come from rebuilding teams that perform better the next year. So congratulations; you’ve responded to concerns about competitive balance by making it worse.
Give me rolling performance Pro-Rel that takes broader health of the program into account (the way it’s SUPPOSED to work in Mexican pro soccer, but… yeah), and we can at least start to talk. Of course, in college you have the unique issue of, y’know, EVERY OTHER SPORT. I suppose that just means that administratively it will still be one conference, just with annual(?) realignment of divisions and payouts.
It would be an interesting hook for a broadcaster, and maybe a way for Wazzu and the Beavs to sell their new friends on unequal revenue sharing, but I don’t see this one happening, at least not yet. Now, if it DOES, and if it works, you might suddenly see Michigan, Georgia, et al raising their eyebrows at a potential way to financially drop their dead weight without completely killing those intercollegiate relationships.
Relegation isn’t going to happen ever in college football beacause of money. Trying to drop a big 10 team is going to be met with go fuck yourself. They aren’t going to drop Rutgers or Northwestern and lose local access to new York or Chicago markets. There’s literally no reason for a power 5(4, really 3 in football) school or conference to ever agree to losing power.
If anything happens, it’ll be a situation analogous to this PAC-2/MWC thing or to the European socer “Super League” proposals. It’ll have to be something new, created above the current structure, where the top teams want to get out, but there are enough cultural and political entanglements that some sort of internally tiered structure might be a compromise.
I don’t think it’s likely either, but I’m maybe a little less certain than you. This specific PAC/MWC thing seems like it’s a way to have what is really one conference, with internal pro-rel that is, at root, REALLY just annual realignment of its divisions and more dramatic performance-based revenue distribution.
This is ultimately what makes this sport so hard to format for. We can talk all we want about the talent level being uneven at best in cfb. But the fact that makes it impossible to stably format for is the imbalance of revenue. The Tennessee Vols bring in in an hour what the Memphis tigers bring in in a year (Source: I made it the fuck up) and it is impossible to pretend that the two teams play the sport at the same level because of this. EVERYTHING is unfair in that model, TN will have bigger stadiums, better recruits, more fans (read more wallets), bigger tv audiences, everything. And so not only is there disparity in the on-field product, but this will prove to only grow. The NFL fans will tell you this is a bad thing, and in a league like the NFL it absolutely is. But in a sport like cfb, where it doesn’t matter that memphis isn’t as good as TN, what matters is that the game is played while we scream at our brothers and sisters for wearing the wrong color. This exists regardless of format. From here I can steer this rant in about 20 different directions but they all come back to the same notion:
Money is the root of all evil. CFB schedule/league format doesn’t matter. They’ll still play football on Saturday’s in the fall in the end.
It depends on what you want. If you want regional rivalry with winning your conference being the goal, the current set up is fine, but the sport is transitioning away from this. If you want a national championship as the end all, then there needs to be some more rules around scheduling and nil money, and college football looks more like the NFL. If you just want football while you get a degree and play a sport while studying, you are 50 years behind.
I want rivalries, regionality is nice and led to the formation of most of them, but I’ll take new ones for sure. But don’t you dare get rid of my existing ones. And I think rivalry trophies mean more than the nc.
The problem with this is that you’d end up killing interest at schools that went down to G5 status. Plus you’d have to realign the conferences every few years. I just don’t think this could ever work in any fashion. Plus Title IX would murder any attempt at this (frankly, I think the statute is due for a massive overhaul anyway; schools that have football teams basically can’t field any other sports for men, and I think there need to be penalties in place for schools that attempt to cut sports as a way to comply)
Oh, there’s a million problems with it, though of course there are problems in the current CFB system too.
One of the dirty little secrets in soccer is that Pro/Rel only REALLY works well in England and maybe Germany. Germany requires significant ownership stakes (nominally a majority) from fans, and England’s supporter culture is so localized and balkanized that it’s pretty slow for fan support to be wicked away to the big clubs, and the Premier League’s TV money is so massive (sound familiar?) that getting in even for a year is a massive boon to the Championship teams that come up (cue Ted Lasso…), so it’s a prize that stimulates interest.
As for Title IX, I’d say the PAC-MWC thought experiments (since that’s really all they are for now) would probably not have major implications. They probably will have to be legally and administratively one conference, and the other sports could either not do it at all, or have their own schemes, and (critically) the amounts of money are not so ridiculous that the difference is likely to kill off sports. Hypothetically, it could be considered nothing more than a tweak on performance-based payouts, plus a different approach to scheduling. Now, if you start having the SEC and B1G looking at it, and there are department-changing amounts of money in play, then yeah, it’s going to be an issue.
More generally, yeah, Title IX is just not built for a world where colleges are running the number 4 and 7 (or whatever… you get the idea) spectator sports leagues in the country. It’s another case of the NCAA and Congress burying their heads in the sand. If they would stop pretending that FBS football players are exactly the same as the Tennis team, then they could properly offer a balanced and equitable extracurricular athletic program to their students with scholarship opportunities matching their student body. MBB too, but that’s cheaper to run and only 13 scholarships, so while still an exercise in cognitive dissonance, it unbalances things much less.
I think you bring up a good point here with the potential structure of a PAC/MWC merger of sorts. But with respect to the Bundesliga, I don’t think pro/rel works that well. And I say that as a Bayern fan. Even in the most competitive years, it’s usually one of Dortmund, Bayern, and rarely Leipzig and Leverkusen that challenge for the title. But you’re spot on with the fan ownership requirements. The only exceptions are for Wolfsburg (majority owned by Volkswagen, I believe) and Leverkusen.
I don’t follow the Bundesliga that closely, but it seems more like fan ownership probably helps avoid some of the worst repercussions that kill off broad interest in any club in Italy or Spain or several other smaller leagues. In Germany, if you go down, it’s still your team, the people in your town literally own it, and I imagine it keeps a core fanbase that’s ready to flare back up and bring out the casual fans again if they get promoted. I’ll defer to you about whether relegation fights and 2 Bundesliga promotion are of much general interest.
In a lot of countries, the top 2-6 clubs are just so desperately far ahead of everyone, and the revenue streams so dependent on the single club itself, that promotion and relegation just doesn’t mean very much. No one (relatively speaking) cares about the bottom half of the table anyway, so why should we care which teams spend the next season in the Eerstedivisie or the Segunda?
You know, it’s an interesting thing you bring up Belgium, because the Belgian Pro League is basically Europe’s version of the Mountain West (strongest league below the top tier). But agreed with respect to fan ownership and interest. Shame this model can’t take off. I suppose colleges are kind of like that, but it’s still a struggle.