My College Football Fix
Nov 24, 2018 18:03:56 GMT
Post by Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets on Nov 24, 2018 18:03:56 GMT
Even with the implementation of a playoff system in 2014 the debate rages on as to how to crown a single national champion. For the record, I don't think we could ever really do that if FBS football stays as is or similar-to-the-way-it-is constructed right now; maybe if we separated FBS into divisions where most if not all the current "Power 5" teams (of which there are 65 (Counting Notre Dame) - nice, easily divisible number) form one tier and the remaining or some of the remaining 65 "Group of 5" teams (sorry AAC) form a lower tier where they crown their own champion. Now, along with how many and which teams would be included in some sort of crowning process, to me there are two big choices we need to make. Conference championship games or no, and debate or no debate.
Allow me to explain. While I am a fan of the conference championship game format (though with 12 teams in a conference, no more), there are two things I do not like about it. One is the fact that teams do not play every other team in their conference every year. I know teams do not go too long without playing teams from the other divisions, but I still like a round robin format. With the way the college football season is structured these days (12-game regular season schedule) the best round robin setup is 10-team conferences with nine conference games. Not only is this nice and tidy, but the only time a tie breaker would be needed is if three teams only have one loss to each other i.e. Team A beats Team B, Team B beats Team C, and Team C beats Team A. This scenario is incredibly rare; in fact, I believe it has only happened once since 1992 (when the SEC became the first major conference to expand to 12 teams and host a conference championship game) when Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech all beat each other in the Big 12 South Division in 2008. The tiebreaker came down to which team was ranked highest in the then-BCS poll. In the round robin format where everyone plays each other (I say that cuz back when the BIG 10 had 11 football playing members (BIG 11?) they played an eight game conference schedule, skipping two members every year. This resulted in many split conference championships, which was annoying) I think you get the most legitimate conference champions.
While I do not believe crowning a single national champion is all that important (we will get to that), conference championships matter, or should matter, a lot. A school winning their conference meant a lot as college football was very regional in its first 80 years or so, and being the “baddest” guy on the block and having those bragging rights over your neighbors for a year was a HUGE deal. Even in the modern era where travel and viewership aren't an issue (as a GA Tech and Texas fan and GA State alum living in Florida, I can watch every GA State, Texas and GA Tech game from my phone), having over 100 teams compete in a sport at the "same level" for a single title creates a situation where you cannot definitively say every year which one of those 100+ teams is the best one of them all. Yeah, we can all watch Alabama or Clemson (two teams, based on the eye test, we can all agree currently are near the top of college football) ass pound their way to a 15-0 record and say, "Okay, they are clearly the best, let them play each other for the title", but that almost never happens. Hell, Alabama won it all twice in recent years in which they did not win their division much less their conference in those seasons! All this to say I like putting an emphasis on conference championships while also providing a fairly reliable method for crowning a champion. What do I mean by "fairly reliable"? Now we segue to the debate vs non-debate aspect.
Despite the fact that I think the current format would be better served with having eight teams in the CFP instead of four, I love the debate aspect of college football (btw, expanding the playoff to eight teams would most definitely not eliminate the debate as the ninth, tenth and eleventh teams would feel "left out" much like the fifth, sixth and seventh teams currently do). I love that there was a "split national championship" in 2017. Yeah, a lot of people do not take UCF's claim to a title seriously (btw, the Colley Matrix College Football Poll did vote them their 2017 national champion so it is not a claim only the school is making), but if you have a problem with their claim to a 2017 national title then you have a problem with a bunch of Alabama's too. I do not think we should have split national titles every year, but it does enhance the "debate" aspect of college football - even the BCS could not prevent it.
Along with the debate as to who is the national champion, there is the debate aspect of who gets to play for it. Right now we have that. A committee chooses the four teams who compete in the playoff. Depending on how one arranges the conferences, it would be possible to leave the choosing of the participants in a playoff to the results on the field. There are multiple ways to do so (including the previously discussed flexibility with how many teams one would want to include in the pool of teams playing for a title), but at the end of the day if you did not want any debate you would want to arrange teams into a certain number of conferences of a certain amount of teams and just include conference champions thus making the issue of who participates in the playoff a matter of math. In addition, this would make the conference title the only factor in which teams play for the national title, thus elevating their importance. Now, just because teams could only participate in the playoff if they win their conference does not mean we have to eliminate debate. Whether we include four teams in the playoff or eight we could arrange it so that there are only four or eight conferences that are participating thus making the participants academic. However, we could make conference titles matter while still having some debate. If there were more conferences than there were spots for participants we could have a ranking committee choose the participants from the conference champions, OR have fewer conferences participating than there are spots in the playoff, and have a committee rank the champions and the necessary amount of at-large participants (a scenario in the real world for this would be to expand the current playoff to eight teams, automatically include the Power 5 champions which the committee would rank 1-5, then the committee would rank the remaining at-large teams 6-8 filling out the playoffs).
Having said all of that, we arrive at my idea. Firstly, there are 130 teams in FBS and I like the idea of them all having a legitimate chance at the national title. Secondly, I like the non-division, non-championship game, round robin schedule for conferences. This means, if we are including all 130 FBS teams, 13 conferences of 10 teams where every team plays everyone in their conference. As far as playoff participants, I think eight is a good number. It used to be that there were clearly 2, 3, maybe 4 teams tops that were good enough to be considered the best team in the country. The BCS usually did a good job of matching the best two up with each other, with there rarely being a lot of debate over who those two should be. When there was some debate it was usually about a third team (like with Auburn in 2004), not four or five other teams. Over the last five years however, I believe the number of teams that could conceivably beat the other best teams in the country to win a national championship has grown to 7-10 in any given year so eight seems like the right amount of teams to include.
By eliminating the conference championship games the first weekend of December is opened up for the first round of the playoffs, but seeing as how we would not be pressed for time we could have an off week and play the first round of the playoffs two weeks after the regular season ends, thus spacing out the playoff games a little as the semi-finals will still be played around New Year's. In my scenario the top four seeds would host the bottom four. The rest of the post-season would be exactly like it is now. I like what we have now with the two semi-final games rotating among the six biggest bowl games (Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Sugar, Peach and Orange), and the championship game being played at a neutral site that moves around like the NFL's Super Bowl. This model does not add any more games to the amount a team has to play currently to win a national title, and it keeps the bowl system in place.
So to recap:
- 13 conferences of 10 teams each made up of the current 130 FBS teams
- 9 game, round robin conference schedule with three non-conference games scheduled as home-and-home matchups
- College Football Playoff Committee chooses and seeds eight playoff participants from the conference champions
- First round of the playoffs is played at the top four seeds' home stadiums two weekends after the regular season ends
- The rest of the playoff/bowl season plays out as it currently does with the losers of the first round being given berths in the non-semi-final New Year's Six Bowl
Now, one final problem: conference realignment. Thirteen conferences of 10 teams each means the conferences cannot stay as they are. Not only that, but if we are going to be "fair" about this we cannot have some conferences loaded with a bunch of powerhouse teams while others have none. To remedy this I have chosen to arrange the conferences regionally (as I think the novelty of competing against your neighbors makes college football fun) while trying to maintain as many traditional rivalries as possible. Note: it is expected in this format that if two traditional rivals do not end up in the same conference they can schedule each other as out of conference rivals every year. My method for arranging all 130 teams was to assign a numerical value to every team of 1-4.
• 1s are considered blue blood college football powers who are expected to be in the running for a national championship every year. There are only so many of these schools and I tried to spread them out as much as possible so as not to make any of the 13 conferences too top heavy.
• 2s are teams that regularly make bowl games, have some good stretches of national relevance in their history, and in any given year could easily win one of the 13 conferences.
• 3s are teams that have had some stretches of national relevance in their history - though nothing too dominant, or if it was it was a LONG time ago (looking at you Rice) - or they are teams that have moved into FBS and have a good tradition at a previous level of competition thus know how to compete for championships. These schools could possibly win one of the 13 conferences if everything fell right in the rest of their conference, and they had a good season on the field.
• 4s are teams that for one reason or another will probably never be able to compete for their conference title (again, looking at you Rice)...but who knows.
Now, the downside of conferences like this is that you create a situation where one team could possibly win the conference 10+ years in a row. While that could happen I find it highly unlikely. EVERY blue chip program I have given a "1" rating to has had a seven win season or less in the last 20 years (some of them very recently), and it would not take a seven win season from one of these schools for them to be supplanted in their conference as champion considering the quality of some second tier teams in each conference. So without further ado, your new College Football FBS alignment:
(I used a mix of current conference names, defunct conference names and ones I made up. Also, inter-conference rivals teams would play in their out of conference schedule every year are in parenthesis)
Northwest Conference
Oregon
Stanford
Boise State
Washington
Washington State
California (UCLA)
Fresno State (Hawaii')
San Jose State (San Diego State)
Oregon State
Nevada (UNLV)
Pacific Conference
USC (Notre Dame)
BYU
Arizona (New Mexico)
Arizona State
Utah
UCLA (California)
UNLV (Nevada)
San Diego State (San Jose State)
Utah State
Hawaii' (Fresno State)
Mountain West Conference
Oklahoma (Texas)
Oklahoma State
Kansas State (Kansas)
Air Force
Colorado (Nebraska)
Colorado State
Tulsa (Houston)
Wyoming
New Mexico (Arizona)
New Mexico State (UTEP)
Southwest Conference
Texas (Oklahoma)
Texas A&M
TCU
Baylor
Texas Tech
SMU (Rice)
UTEP (New Mexico State)
UTSA
Texas State
North Texas
Bayou Conference
LSU (Arkansas)
Ole Miss
Mississippi State
Houston (Tulsa)
Southern Mississippi (Memphis)
Louisiana Tech
University of Louisiana
UL Monroe
Tulane
Rice (SMU)
Mid-American Conference
Notre Dame (USC)
Nebraska (Colorado)
Iowa
Iowa State
Northwestern
Missouri
Kansas (Kansas State)
Illinois
Indiana (Purdue)
Northern Illinois (Ball State)
Mid-West Conference
Michigan (Ohio State)
Michigan State
Wisconsin
Minnesota (Penn State)
Purdue (Indiana)
Toledo (Bowling Green)
Ball State (Northern Illinois)
Central Michigan
Western Michigan
Eastern Michigan
River Valley Conference
Ohio State (Michigan)
West Virginia (Pittsburgh)
Cincinnati (Louisville)
Maryland
Navy (Army)
Miami (OH)
Ohio
Akron
Kent State
Marshall (East Carolina)
Northeast Conference
Penn State (Minnesota)
Pittsburgh (West Virginia)
Syracuse
Boston College
Army (Navy)
Buffalo
Rutgers
Temple
UMass
Connecticut
Southern Conference
Auburn (Alabama)
Virginia Tech
Virginia
Arkansas (LSU)
Memphis (Southern Mississippi)
Vanderbilt (Tennessee)
Arkansas State
Charlotte
Liberty
Old Dominion
Dixie Conference
Alabama (Auburn)
Tennessee (Vanderbilt)
Louisville (Cincinnati)
Kentucky
Western Kentucky
Bowling Green (Toledo)
Middle Tennessee State
UAB
South Alabama
Troy
Southeast Conference
Georgia (South Carolina)
Florida (Florida State)
Georgia Tech (Clemson)
North Carolina (NC State)
Duke
UCF
USF
East Carolina (Marshall)
Georgia Southern (Appalachian State)
Georgia State
Atlantic Coast Conference
Clemson (Georgia Tech)
Florida State (Florida)
Miami
South Carolina (Georgia)
NC State (North Carolina)
Wake Forest
Appalachian State (Georgia Southern)
Florida Atlantic
Florida International
Coastal Carolina
Allow me to explain. While I am a fan of the conference championship game format (though with 12 teams in a conference, no more), there are two things I do not like about it. One is the fact that teams do not play every other team in their conference every year. I know teams do not go too long without playing teams from the other divisions, but I still like a round robin format. With the way the college football season is structured these days (12-game regular season schedule) the best round robin setup is 10-team conferences with nine conference games. Not only is this nice and tidy, but the only time a tie breaker would be needed is if three teams only have one loss to each other i.e. Team A beats Team B, Team B beats Team C, and Team C beats Team A. This scenario is incredibly rare; in fact, I believe it has only happened once since 1992 (when the SEC became the first major conference to expand to 12 teams and host a conference championship game) when Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech all beat each other in the Big 12 South Division in 2008. The tiebreaker came down to which team was ranked highest in the then-BCS poll. In the round robin format where everyone plays each other (I say that cuz back when the BIG 10 had 11 football playing members (BIG 11?) they played an eight game conference schedule, skipping two members every year. This resulted in many split conference championships, which was annoying) I think you get the most legitimate conference champions.
While I do not believe crowning a single national champion is all that important (we will get to that), conference championships matter, or should matter, a lot. A school winning their conference meant a lot as college football was very regional in its first 80 years or so, and being the “baddest” guy on the block and having those bragging rights over your neighbors for a year was a HUGE deal. Even in the modern era where travel and viewership aren't an issue (as a GA Tech and Texas fan and GA State alum living in Florida, I can watch every GA State, Texas and GA Tech game from my phone), having over 100 teams compete in a sport at the "same level" for a single title creates a situation where you cannot definitively say every year which one of those 100+ teams is the best one of them all. Yeah, we can all watch Alabama or Clemson (two teams, based on the eye test, we can all agree currently are near the top of college football) ass pound their way to a 15-0 record and say, "Okay, they are clearly the best, let them play each other for the title", but that almost never happens. Hell, Alabama won it all twice in recent years in which they did not win their division much less their conference in those seasons! All this to say I like putting an emphasis on conference championships while also providing a fairly reliable method for crowning a champion. What do I mean by "fairly reliable"? Now we segue to the debate vs non-debate aspect.
Despite the fact that I think the current format would be better served with having eight teams in the CFP instead of four, I love the debate aspect of college football (btw, expanding the playoff to eight teams would most definitely not eliminate the debate as the ninth, tenth and eleventh teams would feel "left out" much like the fifth, sixth and seventh teams currently do). I love that there was a "split national championship" in 2017. Yeah, a lot of people do not take UCF's claim to a title seriously (btw, the Colley Matrix College Football Poll did vote them their 2017 national champion so it is not a claim only the school is making), but if you have a problem with their claim to a 2017 national title then you have a problem with a bunch of Alabama's too. I do not think we should have split national titles every year, but it does enhance the "debate" aspect of college football - even the BCS could not prevent it.
Along with the debate as to who is the national champion, there is the debate aspect of who gets to play for it. Right now we have that. A committee chooses the four teams who compete in the playoff. Depending on how one arranges the conferences, it would be possible to leave the choosing of the participants in a playoff to the results on the field. There are multiple ways to do so (including the previously discussed flexibility with how many teams one would want to include in the pool of teams playing for a title), but at the end of the day if you did not want any debate you would want to arrange teams into a certain number of conferences of a certain amount of teams and just include conference champions thus making the issue of who participates in the playoff a matter of math. In addition, this would make the conference title the only factor in which teams play for the national title, thus elevating their importance. Now, just because teams could only participate in the playoff if they win their conference does not mean we have to eliminate debate. Whether we include four teams in the playoff or eight we could arrange it so that there are only four or eight conferences that are participating thus making the participants academic. However, we could make conference titles matter while still having some debate. If there were more conferences than there were spots for participants we could have a ranking committee choose the participants from the conference champions, OR have fewer conferences participating than there are spots in the playoff, and have a committee rank the champions and the necessary amount of at-large participants (a scenario in the real world for this would be to expand the current playoff to eight teams, automatically include the Power 5 champions which the committee would rank 1-5, then the committee would rank the remaining at-large teams 6-8 filling out the playoffs).
Having said all of that, we arrive at my idea. Firstly, there are 130 teams in FBS and I like the idea of them all having a legitimate chance at the national title. Secondly, I like the non-division, non-championship game, round robin schedule for conferences. This means, if we are including all 130 FBS teams, 13 conferences of 10 teams where every team plays everyone in their conference. As far as playoff participants, I think eight is a good number. It used to be that there were clearly 2, 3, maybe 4 teams tops that were good enough to be considered the best team in the country. The BCS usually did a good job of matching the best two up with each other, with there rarely being a lot of debate over who those two should be. When there was some debate it was usually about a third team (like with Auburn in 2004), not four or five other teams. Over the last five years however, I believe the number of teams that could conceivably beat the other best teams in the country to win a national championship has grown to 7-10 in any given year so eight seems like the right amount of teams to include.
By eliminating the conference championship games the first weekend of December is opened up for the first round of the playoffs, but seeing as how we would not be pressed for time we could have an off week and play the first round of the playoffs two weeks after the regular season ends, thus spacing out the playoff games a little as the semi-finals will still be played around New Year's. In my scenario the top four seeds would host the bottom four. The rest of the post-season would be exactly like it is now. I like what we have now with the two semi-final games rotating among the six biggest bowl games (Rose, Fiesta, Cotton, Sugar, Peach and Orange), and the championship game being played at a neutral site that moves around like the NFL's Super Bowl. This model does not add any more games to the amount a team has to play currently to win a national title, and it keeps the bowl system in place.
So to recap:
- 13 conferences of 10 teams each made up of the current 130 FBS teams
- 9 game, round robin conference schedule with three non-conference games scheduled as home-and-home matchups
- College Football Playoff Committee chooses and seeds eight playoff participants from the conference champions
- First round of the playoffs is played at the top four seeds' home stadiums two weekends after the regular season ends
- The rest of the playoff/bowl season plays out as it currently does with the losers of the first round being given berths in the non-semi-final New Year's Six Bowl
Now, one final problem: conference realignment. Thirteen conferences of 10 teams each means the conferences cannot stay as they are. Not only that, but if we are going to be "fair" about this we cannot have some conferences loaded with a bunch of powerhouse teams while others have none. To remedy this I have chosen to arrange the conferences regionally (as I think the novelty of competing against your neighbors makes college football fun) while trying to maintain as many traditional rivalries as possible. Note: it is expected in this format that if two traditional rivals do not end up in the same conference they can schedule each other as out of conference rivals every year. My method for arranging all 130 teams was to assign a numerical value to every team of 1-4.
• 1s are considered blue blood college football powers who are expected to be in the running for a national championship every year. There are only so many of these schools and I tried to spread them out as much as possible so as not to make any of the 13 conferences too top heavy.
• 2s are teams that regularly make bowl games, have some good stretches of national relevance in their history, and in any given year could easily win one of the 13 conferences.
• 3s are teams that have had some stretches of national relevance in their history - though nothing too dominant, or if it was it was a LONG time ago (looking at you Rice) - or they are teams that have moved into FBS and have a good tradition at a previous level of competition thus know how to compete for championships. These schools could possibly win one of the 13 conferences if everything fell right in the rest of their conference, and they had a good season on the field.
• 4s are teams that for one reason or another will probably never be able to compete for their conference title (again, looking at you Rice)...but who knows.
Now, the downside of conferences like this is that you create a situation where one team could possibly win the conference 10+ years in a row. While that could happen I find it highly unlikely. EVERY blue chip program I have given a "1" rating to has had a seven win season or less in the last 20 years (some of them very recently), and it would not take a seven win season from one of these schools for them to be supplanted in their conference as champion considering the quality of some second tier teams in each conference. So without further ado, your new College Football FBS alignment:
(I used a mix of current conference names, defunct conference names and ones I made up. Also, inter-conference rivals teams would play in their out of conference schedule every year are in parenthesis)
Northwest Conference
Oregon
Stanford
Boise State
Washington
Washington State
California (UCLA)
Fresno State (Hawaii')
San Jose State (San Diego State)
Oregon State
Nevada (UNLV)
Pacific Conference
USC (Notre Dame)
BYU
Arizona (New Mexico)
Arizona State
Utah
UCLA (California)
UNLV (Nevada)
San Diego State (San Jose State)
Utah State
Hawaii' (Fresno State)
Mountain West Conference
Oklahoma (Texas)
Oklahoma State
Kansas State (Kansas)
Air Force
Colorado (Nebraska)
Colorado State
Tulsa (Houston)
Wyoming
New Mexico (Arizona)
New Mexico State (UTEP)
Southwest Conference
Texas (Oklahoma)
Texas A&M
TCU
Baylor
Texas Tech
SMU (Rice)
UTEP (New Mexico State)
UTSA
Texas State
North Texas
Bayou Conference
LSU (Arkansas)
Ole Miss
Mississippi State
Houston (Tulsa)
Southern Mississippi (Memphis)
Louisiana Tech
University of Louisiana
UL Monroe
Tulane
Rice (SMU)
Mid-American Conference
Notre Dame (USC)
Nebraska (Colorado)
Iowa
Iowa State
Northwestern
Missouri
Kansas (Kansas State)
Illinois
Indiana (Purdue)
Northern Illinois (Ball State)
Mid-West Conference
Michigan (Ohio State)
Michigan State
Wisconsin
Minnesota (Penn State)
Purdue (Indiana)
Toledo (Bowling Green)
Ball State (Northern Illinois)
Central Michigan
Western Michigan
Eastern Michigan
River Valley Conference
Ohio State (Michigan)
West Virginia (Pittsburgh)
Cincinnati (Louisville)
Maryland
Navy (Army)
Miami (OH)
Ohio
Akron
Kent State
Marshall (East Carolina)
Northeast Conference
Penn State (Minnesota)
Pittsburgh (West Virginia)
Syracuse
Boston College
Army (Navy)
Buffalo
Rutgers
Temple
UMass
Connecticut
Southern Conference
Auburn (Alabama)
Virginia Tech
Virginia
Arkansas (LSU)
Memphis (Southern Mississippi)
Vanderbilt (Tennessee)
Arkansas State
Charlotte
Liberty
Old Dominion
Dixie Conference
Alabama (Auburn)
Tennessee (Vanderbilt)
Louisville (Cincinnati)
Kentucky
Western Kentucky
Bowling Green (Toledo)
Middle Tennessee State
UAB
South Alabama
Troy
Southeast Conference
Georgia (South Carolina)
Florida (Florida State)
Georgia Tech (Clemson)
North Carolina (NC State)
Duke
UCF
USF
East Carolina (Marshall)
Georgia Southern (Appalachian State)
Georgia State
Atlantic Coast Conference
Clemson (Georgia Tech)
Florida State (Florida)
Miami
South Carolina (Georgia)
NC State (North Carolina)
Wake Forest
Appalachian State (Georgia Southern)
Florida Atlantic
Florida International
Coastal Carolina
Granted, I recognize that there are a bevy of other options that would also work in some form or another, but I like this one and think it would make college football more entertaining. What do you think?