Very intriguing idea. But yeah, not feasible. If you’re the Pac-2 you’ve got nothing to lose. But if you’re the MWC, do you look at the PAC – who has a history of going against the CFB grain (e.g. setting up a PAC-12 Network unaffiliated with traditional media partners, putting their HQ in downtown San Francisco, pursuing a streaming-heavy media deal…) only to fail in epically catastrophic ways – and think, “I need to hitch my wagon to that”?
“We have to think differently,” said one Mountain West athletic director who wished to remain anonymous. “We’re always trying to fit things in a box and we are always late to the party. How do we get in front of this?”
I’m curious who that was. It’s got to be the AD of either Boise, CSU, Fresno, or SDSU.
The article also supposes North Dakota State and South Dakota State could join the system for depth, but do they even want to move up? They definitely could compete, but they seem comfortable with where they’re at. This system does need bodies to work, though. I would say add UTEP and UTSA (and if they don’t want to come, Tulsa, Texas State, Sam Houston, and even New Mexico State could suffice in a pinch).
College Football is not a uniform level of sport and that’s ok. I wish we could stop pretending this is not the case. My hope is for the playoff expansion to really drive this point home. I hope America is ready for a 3 loss ohio state to win the nc
My issue with relegation is thatit just doesn't work on the 4-5 year cycle college sports is supposed to work on. Some schools would sustain it, sure, but most the others bounce around a bit class to class.
I wish the NFL would step in and just declare the NCAA a development league, and move on. Let the branding stay with the schools or whatever, still allow the athletes to attend school. But making it a requirement in an environment where it's increasingly hard to manage both school and playing along with the (let's be honest) sham education being provided at times is stupid as fuck. Idk a better system, because I don't think it should be like a HS player draft, and people going to school for the education while also being able to play would get shafted by that. But maybe like a "league designation" or something where the players are tagged by a franchise as a developmental player and given a stipend and some access to player advocates or something, both to show mutual interest in a continued career and to help drive home the point that you aren't guaranteed to make it. Maybe take school seriously.
That's also just me rambling about shit above my pay grade though.
I mostly agree, though I'd draw a distinction between a minor league (think baseball) and a "lower league" and I'd want to avoid to many direct relationships between CFb and the NFL. For me, a lower league still matters because winning the prize in reach is its own reward, and development is a side effect that happens in the pursuit of winning.
Given recruiting, there's a bit of chicken and egg, but if the triple option still won natties, then top teams would still use it, draft status be damned. Meanwhile, the Crash Davises of the world get drummed out of Minor League baseball because being a "AA+" player stops being important the moment you're too old to develop any farther, despite it being enough to win AA games. I'd rather watch semi-pro indy league baseball than the most stacked AAA team ever.
There are just an incredible number of things to account for, most of which are complicated by the fact that this billion dollar industry is tied to state universities and other colleges, and all the fun that comes along with it.
I’m actually not opposed to a relegation type model, but you make some good points that I hadn’t thought of. In the end I think we should just go back to letting every team schedule their own season (let’s play other counties’ national american football teams again!) and then argue about who had the best season in the comments
I wish the NFL would step in and just declare the NCAA a development league
Hard pass for me. This does get to the problem though, which is that there is no minor league for pro American football and the NFL has worked very hard to keep it this way. Why can’t they create their own feeder league, parallel to CFB, for those that don’t want to “play school” (which is probably most athletes tbh). The draft could draw from both CFB and this “G-League”. Yeah, CFB would vastly diminish in scale, but it would keep all the history/traditions while hopefully cutting back on the sham classes, coaching salary arms race, and NIL drama.
That’s why I had so much hope for the XFL in 2020. It seemed to offer an alternate path for players to get paid (that was pre-NIL) and skip school. If only it had come a few years earlier to take hold before CFB seemed to cross the Rubicon with NIL, the transfer portal, and conference realignment.
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.
Relegation isn’t going to happen ever in college football Bea of money.
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.
Add comment