How College Football Could Take A Page From Futbal
A System to make Mid-Majors Competitive with the Big Boys
With the new College Football Playoff upon us, one would think that this new structure would open up an avenue for a mid-major team to win a national championship. It is starting to appear, however, that the Power Five conferences are attempting to exclude the mid-majors from the grown-ups’ table yet again as they endeavour to gain autonomy. Their efforts appear to be fruitful as they were just granted easier voting rights by the NCAA. So what could the mid-majors do to allow themselves to break through and compete with the big boys and avoid being pushed aside to the fringes of college football?
June Jones, head coach of Southern Methodist University (SMU) has an answer. He recently said in an interview that the “have-nots” (mid-majors) needed to do something drastic, such as move their season into the spring as USFL once did. Certainly a person could argue several benefits to such a change, however, the competition with spring sports as well as the oddity of such a change may turn off not only fans but athletes as well. Furthermore, two spring football leagues—the USFL and AFL—have both folded at least once.
I have a different approach. While it is not a perfect one, my suggestion is less drastic, a better solution, and can be summed up in three words: promotion and relegation.
Soccer leagues around the world utilize a system that allows the best teams to rise to the top and compete against each other, while teams that are not as talented are sifted out into the lower realms of the league and can rebuild in an attempt to get back to the top division. In Britain this works extremely well as nearly every large city has their own soccer team and promotion and relegation is an effective means to give every team an avenue to get to the top flight (or at least the illusion of an avenue). For a long time I have believed that such a system would work well for a college football system with 100 plus schools, and Bill Connelly of SB Nation wrote an excellent article on the subject, but it is unlikely that all the conferences could agree to something like that. Especially the ADs from schools that are the perennial bottom feeders of the Power Five conferences (looking at you Kentucky). My argument, however, could work for mid-major conferences, and here is my plan:
First the (newly formed) American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, Mid-American Conference, Mountain West Conference, and Sun Belt Conference would agree that it would be in their best interest to work together. Then, they would set up a “champions’ league” (working title) in which they create a collaborative conference out of their best teams, each sending their top two finishers. So if based off the 2013 standings, you get a 10 team league that looks like this:
University of Central Florida, Cincinnati, Marshall, Rice, Bowling Green, Northern Illinois University, Fresno State, Utah State, Louisiana-Lafeyette, and Arkansas State.
I will accept that outwardly these are not the most well known of the mid major schools, but if you look at the rest of the teams in the conferences, there are several names that do pop with relevance that more than likely would become perennials within the “champions’ league:” Boise State, ECU, Houston, and SMU just to name a few.
The teams would play a nine game league schedule, four non-conference games, and a championship game consisting of the two schools with the best record. The member conferences would simply continue their regular seasons, only with two less teams. After the season, conferences would retain their team ranked lowest in the “champions’ league” and replace said team with their conference champion.
Think of all the benefits to such an operation! Teams could get national branding and exposure and open up potential recruiting hotbeds. The league would create a certain shock value as well. No longer would the teams be just “mid-majors,” but the BEST “mid-majors.” Furthermore, it would increase the strength of schedule, as even the less talented teams would be significantly better than the usual conference bottom-feeders. Finally, one could suspect there would be quite a lucrative TV deal to broadcast an additional conference where every team has a potential storyline, even in normal conference play; imagine the added drama in Sun Belt conference play when Western Kentucky battles with Troy for the coveted promotion to “champions’ league.”
First would be travel and the related expenses, as some teams would have to travel coast-to-coast to play games, an example being Fresno State in Califonia traveling to UCF in Orlando, Florida. The conferences would have to ask themselves if the added money from a TV deal for the league would actually provide enough to justify its creation, as well as how they would distribute the money? The conferences would also have to address how relegation would work, for if only a conference’s worst team in the league was relegated, it may not be a very fair system. There are many scenarios where one of the league’s best teams could be relegated despite being in the very top of the table while a team with a lousy record could return and play the following year, depending on where the teams’ conference mate finish relative to them.
A promotion-relegation model for college athletics may seem outrageous, maybe even downright un-American, however it is something that the mid-majors need. They need a splash, a talking point, a reason for the press to pay attention to their entire conference, not just the one or two teams that happen to be nationally relevant in a given year. Furthermore, these conferences need to be aggressive and seek ways to further themselves rather than relying on tradition. The Big 12 and Big East relied on tradition, and both came to the brink of collapse, and one more or less did (at least to the point that its ashes are included as part of my blueprint). Simply put, these mid-major conferences need to aggressively counter a Power Five that will continually attempt to marginalize the mid-majors and skim off their few “haves” until the mid-majors are effectively second division football—only with no chance at promotion.
Follow me on Twitter @danhillida
