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?
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.