December Madness
The “G5” FBS conferences have lived for decades with no chance for a national championship of any kind. Let’s change that and energize the entire college football postseason.
It’s December 17, 2016, “opening day” of Bowl Season in college football. There’s a slate of five games between “Group of Five” teams representing the Sun Belt, Conference USA, American Athletic, Mid-American, and Mountain West conferences, from cosmopolitan locales such as Mobile, Alabama and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Where the NCAA basketball tournament’s opening week is one of the most anticipated and thrilling events in sports, the “opening week” of the college football postseason is the exact opposite: Only football-viewing addicts care, and while some of the games are competitive they are all low-stakes and pure exhibitions played in front of quarter-full stadiums.
Division I college football has evolved the pinnacle of its postseason to its own “final four” format that generates a lot of buzz during the season and around the new year. But the “opening rounds” of the post season have become even more lackluster. The College Football Playoff has slightly diminished the prestige of the other major bowl games (even “New Year’s Six” games) that are not playoff games, and the sheer number of bowl games (a mind-boggling FORTY-PLUS) has watered down the quality of the participants, matchups, sites and what is up with these sponsors (there are now Dollar General and Motel 6 bowls).
Bowl Badness
Bowl matchups for the “Power 5” conferences (Big 10, Pac 12, SEC, ACC, Big 12) carry a bit more cachet, played around the holidays and mostly against each other’s teams. The Power 5/non-New Year’s 6 bowls are nice contests that you would expect to see in a decent non-conference slate at the beginning of the season: Pitt vs. Northwestern, Nebraska vs. Tennessee, North Carolina vs. Stanford, TCU vs. Georgia, Louisville vs. LSU. But they’re just exhibitions, and star senior players such as Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey are ducking out of them to keep themselves healthy for the NFL draft, a la pro all-star games (especially the NFL Pro Bowl).
There are only five of the 41 bowls that are Power 5 vs. Group of 5 match-ups. Otherwise, the bowl season is pretty much segregated into a Power 5 bowl slate and a Group of 5 schedule. If the Power 5 bowls have lost some luster, the Group of 5 bowls are becoming a bit of a wasteland.
The G5 in no man’s land
Worse for the “G5,” none of their bowls will ever stand a chance of crowning either of their participants a national champion — nowhere close. The schools in the Group of 5 simply have no opportunity to ever win one. This is not the case for the Power 5, FCS, NCAA Division II or III, or NAIA. They crown national champions, the Group of 5 does not. The “bowl coalition” or “CFP committee” or whoever the BCS has morphed into lately will argue that the G5 is part of the FBS conversation, but that’s ridiculous. Western Michigan defeated two Big 10 teams on their way to a wholly dominant 13–0 season. The Broncos and mighty Alabama were the only undefeated teams in “Division I” college football. If there was ever an argument for a Group of Five team to make the College Football Playoff, WMU from the Mid-American Conference would have been it. But instead the CFP committee was arguing whether perhaps two-loss Penn State or Michigan should get the fourth playoff spot over one-loss Washington. Western Michigan was decidedly not “part of the conversation.”
The G5 is in no man’s land. So is the NCAA for that matter: Once the college football postseason starts, the NCAA and all of their postseason expertise from other sports (Baseball and Softball’s College World Series, the Frozen Four, the aforementioned March Madness), sits on the sidelines while the “bowl championship cartel” of bowls and conference presidents and TV networks takes over.
Could the G5’s make December look more like March?
What would prevent the Group of Five from leaving the bowl racket to the Power Five and run their own postseason with the NCAA? The NCAA runs “college football playoffs” in every other division, why not add a new “level” just above FCS (the “football championship series,” formerly “Division 1-AA) consisting of roughly 80 schools?
I don’t have a perfect playoff “system” devised because there are several interconnected factors at play. Such a system could be anywhere from “easier said than done” to making too much sense. Here are some considerations that would need to be ironed out or cleared up.
- We’d be looking at 8 or 16 teams, with at least the first round of an 8-team and the first and second rounds of a 16-team bracket being played at the campus of the higher-seeded school.
- Army and Navy are very much an important part of the Group of Five, and they play their annual rivalry game on the weekend after all the traditional conference championship games. This second weekend in December would be the ideal slot to perhaps begin a “first round,” but we’d want Navy or Army to be included if they qualify.
- Do the G5 conferences play championship games on that first weekend in December, or does the NCAA simply “seed” 8 or 16 G5 teams and begin the playoff that weekend?
- 30 G5 teams qualified for bowls … so what happens to the 14 to 22 teams that don’t make said playoff? Do they get no postseason at all? Do they get matched up in ceremonial “NCAA bowls” or should the playoff bracket extend to 24 or 32?
- Some Group of Five players and, more notably, G5 coaches view their participation in bowl games as an opportunity to showcase themselves to the next level — players to the NFL and coaches to the Power 5. But NFL scouting is so advanced, bowl games really don’t make a huge difference and many NFL-bound players are beginning to bail on meaningless exhibition bowl games to avoid injury.
The Mid-Major Leagues
So, lots to figure out, and these roadblocks may be insurmountable. However, a “Mid-Major Madness” has to have some allure to the NCAA and the Group of Five schools. Other prominent sports such as basketball, hockey and baseball/softball could eventually follow suit but probably will not … mid-majors are not as “locked-out” of the national championship conversation in these other sports. While their success rate is limited, occasional successes give them a light at the end of the tunnel each season.
- The University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team plays in the mid-major AAC and dominates Division 1.
- Recent NCAA men’s basketball Final Fours have featured Memphis, Wichita State and Butler, and Villanova won the championship in 2016. None of these teams hail from “BCS” conferences.
- Coastal Carolina won the NCAA men’s baseball College World Series in 2016, as well.
In most other sports, mid-majors at least “belong.” Their size and resources make competing with the Power 5/BCS conferences difficult but not impossible. Football is the only sport where physical match-ups in size, strength and weight truly matter. Xavier or Gonzaga can compete in men’s basketball with excellent coaching and the right mix of five athletes on the court. And certainly this year’s Western Michigan football team can compete with just about anyone, but they would have trouble running the gauntlet of the college football playoff. Say Washington and Ohio State had two losses and the committee made WMU the fourth seed. They would need to pull an earth-shattering upset against Alabama followed by an equally stunning victory over Clemson — two programs stocked with future NFL talent at multiple positions.
Mid-major football deserves its own place, its own system, its own championship. Based on these and other factors, it seems clear that there are two workable solutions:
- The Group of Five simply stages its own semifinals and finals, holding them a day or two the Power Five playoff games — perhaps on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve since the CFP seems to be moving away from it original plan to align semifinal games on NYE (ratings have been terrible in the first two years). All other teams get slotted into bowl games as usual — but that “Group of Five champion” auto-bid to one of the NY6 bowls would go away, and a Western Michigan would be the #1 seed in the new G5 playoff.
- The Group of Five leaves the “FBS” behind and joins back up with the NCAA for a playoff format. I would suggest 24 teams with first-round byes, because there will be no bowls. (However, perhaps the NCAA could stage an “NIT” of three or four crossover games between 6–6 teams? When you begin to spell some of this out, you expose how ridiculous that first week-and-a-half of bowl games between .500 teams in empty baseball and soccer stadiums really are.)
The right answer might be both, start with your own “football four” and eventually move into an NCAA “division 1A” playoff after bowl and TV contracts have expired.
Rumblings begin
On January 2, 2016 Western Michigan will play Wisconsin in the Cotton Bowl and there are rumblings among Group of Five athletic departments about the “G5 final four” plan. The majority of them seem to be less than enthusiastic about the idea, including WMU’s head coach.
Here’s hoping that after another year or two of ridiculous, forgettable bowl games, more Group of Five athletic departments and coaches will come to their senses and put their programs, fans, and — most importantly—players in a better position to play for a championship in a meaningful postseason.
