Below are my thoughts about how to fix college football. Realistically, as these changes would radically reshape the entire sport, and I know college football is extremely conservative, I realize there is no chance of anything like this being implemented; but I can always dream.
Be advised that my ideas are coming from someone who has almost no interest in college football as it is currently constituted (other than the annual Harvard-Yale game). I am an avid fan of several other sports, including professional football and college basketball, but college football has always left me cold, both because I don’t have a “natural” rooting interest, and because the end of the season always seems like such a let down. I’m just not the type of person that gets excited about a postseason that consists of a series of arbitrary teams playing against each other at an arbitrary location for seemingly no reward. And while college football proponents extol the virtues of the constant pressure of the regular season, realistically, the top teams only play three or four games each year where the outcome is ever in doubt. If the current bowl season does excite you, then you’ll probably see these changes as unnecessary. But for the rest of us, I would like to broach the “College Football Premier League”. Before I explain in detail, here is a quick overview of what would change and what would stay the same.
What my proposal retains from the existing system:
- Preserve the traditional conferences
- Preserve the 5 top-tier “BCS” bowl games and 14 lower-tier bowl games
- Regular season games would remain of utmost importance, with only a few losses knocking a team out of playoff contention.
Advantageous changes:
- Crown a real national champion every year through a playoff
- Bowl games finally become meaningful
- During regular season, several top-20 teams play each other every week
- Teams have something to play for throughout the season, even if they have lost a couple games
- Teams from minor conference could compete for national championship on equal footing with teams from major conferences
Disadvantageous changes:
- Some conference rivalries would be intermittently disrupted
- “Rivalry games” may lose some importance compared to other games against top teams
- Top college teams would perhaps spend more time traveling during regular season
- Less freedom for teams to schedule their own opponents, and less freedom for bowls to choose teams that “travel well” (is this really a disadvantage for the public?)
- Might become easier for team to create recruiting dynasties
- “Best” team in college football might not be eligible for national championship
How would it accomplish these things? By creating a “Premier League” of the top 20 college football teams for each year. Like European soccer leagues, the composition of the Premier League would change from year to year, with poorly performing teams from the Premier League being relegated back to their traditional conferences, and winning teams from the traditional conferences being promoted. There are about 120 teams in the top division of college football, so about 1/6 of these teams each year would be Premier, and the remaining 5/6 would remain in their regular conferences.
I will explain how a team makes to the Premier League a little further below. But once in the Premier League, each team would play a 10-game regular season against other Premier teams. Perhaps there would be four divisions of five teams each, or just two conferences of ten…this isn’t that important. The 10 game league schedule would allow each Premier team to schedule two or three other games that would not count in the Premier League standings. These would either be early-season warm-up games, or traditional rivalry games as the teams choose. All teams not in the Premier League would play their regular/conference season as before, except that each conference would have two or three fewer teams in it each year.
At the end of the Premier regular season, the League would be divided into three tiers:
- The bottom six teams with the worst records would not be bowl eligible, and would be relegated back to their conference
- The top six teams would automatically be retained in the Premier League the next season, and would advance to the playoff for the national championship
- The middle eight teams would be invited to a play-in bowl game and have a chance to play themselves back into the premier league.
National Championship Playoff
The playoffs for the national championship would consist of six teams, with the top two receiving byes into the semifinals. Thus there would be five playoff bowl games, with the locations of these games being the current “BCS” bowls. As is currently done, the location of the national championship would rotate among these bowls each year. The bowls could also retain some regional character; e.g. the Rose Bowl could agree to host the playoff game involving the Western division champion each year.
Play-In Bowl Games
In addition to the five playoff bowls, there would 14 additional bowl games involving both teams from the Premier League and teams from the traditional conferences. But these bowl games would no longer be played only for pride. Instead, the winner of each bowl game would be promoted to the Premier League the following season, while the loser would be relegated to the conferences. I think this would add a lot of national interest to bowl games that are now only exciting to alums and true college football junkies.
Four of these bowl games would match-up the middle eight teams from the Premier League. The other ten games would match-up the top 20 teams from the conferences. Many of these bowl games could retain traditional conference rivalries; e.g. the Cotton bowl could match the champion of the Big 12 with the 2nd place team in the SEC. But most of these games now have dumb corporate names that change every few years, so this tradition is pretty much irrelevant anyway. There would probably need to be some rules about automatic qualifiers to make the system fair….e.g the top 2 teams in each major conference and the champion of each minor conference automatically qualify for bowl; or, at least one bowl matches up minor conference champions, to assure minor conference representation in the Premier League every year.
Under this system, exactly half of the premier league would turnover each year, with ten new teams eligible to fight for the national championship against the defending champion and nine other holdovers.
One final question would be how the initial teams would be chosen for the Premier League’s first season. I have no strong opinion on this….perhaps all ten teams invited to BCS bowls in the last season of the BCS system plus winners of ten other bowl games. Or the league could just automatically include the top 20 teams in the BCS standings from the previous year.
I suppose one possible argument against this proposal might be that, because the quality of teams varies dramatically from one year to the next, it is possible that the best team in college football might be one that did not even qualify for the Premier League the previous year. In the case of 2010, it is likely that Oregon would have qualified, since they easily won the PAC 10 and played in a BCS bowl, and possible Auburn would have qualified, they had a mediocre record in a very strong SEC division, but won a New Year’s Day bowl game.
As I have very little knowledge about the financial particulars involved in college football, I really have no idea whether this plan would be beneficial to the bowls and the individual programs. But I would certainly be more likely to tune in, especially around this time of year. Wouldn’t you?
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