Conference Realignment
With all the conference realignment moves over the last year and speculation of more over the last couple days, I wanted to offer up my take on it. Instead of much larger conferences, I’m in favor of much, much smaller conferences that are more like divisions and then turn scheduling over to the NCAA. Conferences are kind of an archaic concept nowadays anyway for the larger sports. They were designed to ease scheduling and reduce travel by creating regional conferences. But since the amount of money earned has grown and most teams have their own plane or can afford to charter one now, it isn’t as big of a deal. I think you keep your conferences for all sports except football and basketball. For football and basketball, you have a small 4 team division that includes all the nearby schools, particularly any rivals or teams that you want to play every year. (One example would be Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M, another would be California, USC, UCLA, and Stanford, still another is Alabama, Auburn, Arkansas, and LSU) Then, every year, your schedule includes 1 game with each of the schools in your division and 1 additional permanent opponent to cover any rivalries not included in the divisions. For example, let’s say Michigan and Ohio State end up in different divisions, then they become each others additional permanent opponent. That’s 4 of your 12 games. Also, everyone is going to start off the season with a cupcake. I know, it ruins the excitement of week 1. There are a grand total of like 10 games to get excited about in any opening week of the season and those will be gone now, but hey, that’s it for the cupcakes. One cupcake in week 1 to get everyone some practice in new schemes or new coaches, whatever and some live hitting and game action for all the freshman and then we move on so you don’t have Alabama playing Georgia Southern in week 9. The other 7 games on your schedule will be scheduled by the NCAA and will be based on your recent onfield performance, similar to the way the NFL does it. I’m thinking 60% based on last years schedule, 30% on two years ago, 10% on three years ago. So the better you are, the tougher your schedule is. The worse you are, your schedule gets easier as you go on. That way, everyone has a balanced schedule, no talk of Boise State playing an easier schedule than the SEC, etc. With this in place, you don’t need some elaborate 8 or 16 team playoff to declare a champion that takes forever to decide on the field and requires fans to travel all around and causes more controversy. We then have a simple 4 team playoff, with the schedules more even, that’s all that’s needed and it can take the place of the conference championship games. You have round 1 two weeks after the season, and the championship game will be 3 weeks after that. You can still keep all the bowl games too (although I’d change that to require 7 wins instead of 6, 6-6 just isn’t worthy of a bowl in my opinion). I know many fans don’t understand the importance of keeping the bowls, but the bowls matter to the players and the smaller schools. It’s good publicity for them and it helps out in recruiting. The players enjoy going to and playing in the bowls, it’s somewhere different and special to play and turns the spotlight onto them and their program, so you have to keep them. I think smaller is better though in “conferences”, not larger.