My Assumptions About the Superconference Armageddon

Just to defend Baylor — they didn’t get into the Big 12 solely on politics. they got in because once the Big 8 agreed to go to 12 instead of 10, Baylor was the obvious choice. At that point in time, Baylor was the historic third most successful SWC program now that Arkansas was gone. They also were the only availbale SWC team, other than Rice, not on NCAA probation at the time (after Texas and A&M were in the Big 8 fold). Baylor ran a solidly middle class football program by the rules — which wasn’t a small factor. At the time, once the Big 8 decided to go to 12, Baylor was the best choice on the board.

Now, things didn’t work out so well, as Baylor’s football program went from solid middle class to absolute dregs of the nation, but it wasn’t such a bad idea at the time. To this day, they’ve still won more titles than Texas Tech. Baylor’s certainly in trouble now, making it far harder for the Texas legislature to work on their behalf.

And if I’m Cincinnati’s AD, I’m paranoid as hell about conference re-alignment. The bottom half of the Big East is in huge trouble. They need some ACC schools to defect, opening up ACC slots for them. Or else they will be out in the cold with Iowa St.

But they will happen eventually I’m afraid. And I could definitely see the 4 big names break off and form a Premier League of sorts, with teams likely only having to step down and play one D-1 opponent per year (I’d also expect I-A and I-AA to be consolidated at this point). Other option would be 8 superconferences, which you could achieve with all of the I-AA teams planning on moving up right now. Either way, Notre Dame will be screwed if they stay out of it, which they will because they’re Notre Dame. I’d really rather everybody just go to 12 teams and be happy, but the MAC is already bursting that bubble…

… but I think if the 16-team conference were going to really happen, it would have happened in this past round. Increasing a conference to 16 teams basically forces the entire college football world to change everything about how it does everything. From conference scheduling to a championship game, and potentially even to the number of divisions the conference has. And most controversial rumor about the Pac-16 that Larry Scott was coming up with was that it wanted 2 BCS spots (one for each division champion), which would effectively render a championship game meaningless (if you still had one at all). If every 16-team conference then got 2 BCS spots, well, then that’s 8 automatic BCS spots, plus Notre Dame and Texas in the years that they’re good… which leaves no at-large teams except when ND or UT don’t qualify for automatic spots.

As an alternative, I have a solution that is much simpler and doesn’t require the entire college football world to re-make itself from virtually square one. (I also discussed this recently on Dawg Sports.)


Re-form the Big Eight.

Oklahoma, Ok. St., Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Kansas, Kansas St., and Baylor (or Iowa State, but who are we kidding, the Texas politicos will get Baylor in).

That lineup is a conference that will still be strong enough to be a BCS automatic qualifier, will preserve the basic college football infrastructure still in place, and will also allow Texas to be the independent that they really want to be.

And all without blowing up the whole world.

two divisions, that’s 7 divisional games, which leaves room for only one more (two tops) intra-divisional game. The teams in each division would practically never play each other, only in a championship game. Might as well make in 9 teams in each division, with 8 “division/conference” games and then a championship game versus the winner of the other division, but then you’d basically have two separate conferences under one umbrella in name and championship tie-in only.
That is unless they decide to play 10 or more conference games every year, but with cupcake home games being so lucrative that would seem unlikely.

I realize that only a short season ago they went 12-0 and were in a BCS bowl (where they proceded to get the shit knocked out of them by Florida), but before that they had little or no football success to speak of. They are located in a large city, but that is often more a hinderance in the college game than a help (see: Northwestern, Temple, BC, etc.). They are completely overshadowed in their own state by their bigger brother (OSU). They only have a 30,000 seat stadium. I also remember reading somewhere on ESPN that their athletic department was having financial troubles.

If the superconferences rise, my call is for Iowa State and Cincy to be left out.

I’ll still follow my beloved Gamecocks and go to games, but the rest of the college football world will slowly die in my mind. I just won’t like the pro-sport feel of it.

Ok, I’ve been thinking about it and I think I may have a solution to how these 16-team superconfderences could work out the scheduling.

Someone else will have to do some analysis because I’m too tired to worry about it right now, but here goes….

What might work is getting rid of the divisional model altogether. Instead of having 2 8-team divisions or 4 4-team divisions you simply get rid of it altogether. Now naturally there are some long standing rivalries that need to be preserved and you can do that if you take 2 or 3 games out of the season and save those for important rivalries. You really need to add a 9th conference game to ensure a greater number of conference teams being played. In fact, you might even add a 10th and that could work better than you think because you have to remember that 4 16-team superconferences are probably going to form their own division within the NCAA. There’s no reason to break away from the NCAA, but there is already talk of a BCS division becoming the new Div 1-A or FBS or whatever you want to call it. Playing teams from lower divisions is not going to be as desirable because you just don’t need to do it that much. Playing teams from other superconferences may also occur, but once you’ve got your prime OOC match-up you don’t need to worry about anything else because the new larger conferences with the championship game takes care of the requirement to play a strong OOC schedule. Everyone will be on a new playing field with new stronger teams coming to their conference.

The number could be debated later, but basically what you do is rotate the rest of the conference games on the schedule. Don’t worry about pairings or making sure you have the right competitive balance in each division. Geographical concerns aren’t really important either, that’s just the convention we’ve been working with so long that we automatically insert it into any solution. Rotating 7 conference games rather than 2 or 3 allows you to play a greater number of teams on a more regular basis. That’s the unity we were talking about earlier.

Instead of using predetermined alignments to come up with who could potentially match up in the championship game you just take the top 2 teams from across the conference. You will certainly need tie breakers along the way to pick those teams, but I think this is much more workable than breaking the teams into divisions. You are always going to have competitive imbalance in the various schedules that teams will play, but there is no way of avoiding that because teams rise and fall even though we predict future success based on past success. The thing is, that you already have that factor at play now.

Take last season for example, the 4 best teams in the conference were all in the West. You could also make an argument that Miss St was just as good as South Carolina who won the East. So there is no way of predicting with any regularity who will be good even if you try to match teams up in divisions based on that very idea.

What do y’all think?

I think the SECs top choices for expansion would be Clemson, FSU, Texas A&M, and either OU/Okla St.