A Thoroughly Modern College Football Structure and Schedule

Posted on 2012-03-19 in Uncategorized

The current college football structure has grown and branched over many years. During this time it has developed from a nascent college club sport on the east coast to a big dollars production. In the process it gave us Woody and Bo, the Iron Bowl, plucky independent Notre Dame, and all sorts of other good things. But lately the sport is organized less to keep alive hallowed traditions and more to funnel TV advertisement dollars into college athletic departments. And high-powered teams regularly schedule the worst teams they can get away with safe in the knowledge that stadia will be filled with fans regardless of the opponent. Along the way the guys in pastel blazers who run the various bowls end up with a couple million bucks and college football coaches are routinely the highest paid employee in their respective state governments. So, since this much has already changed in college football, and mostly at behest of television advertisers, let us throw off all vestiges of continuity and begin with an open mind and clean slate to redesign this sport we enjoy. That the current state of affairs is well-designed to funnel money to those with influence is no accident and is the primary reason that this plan will never come to fruition.

Structure

Let us operate in a system of 120 college football teams, this is approximately the number of Division I-A teams currently, so it presents little challenge. We divide these teams into four Regions. For simplicity, refer to these as North, South, East and West. I imagine that these could be: the Big Ten footprint + northern Big XII, the SEC footprint, the east coast and mid-Atlantic, and the Pac-12 footprint + Texas. Of course this plan is highly disruptive and completely does away with the current athletic conferences; we didn't call it thoroughly modern for nothing.

Each of these Regions is composed of three Levels per Region. Call these I, II, and III. These are ordered from highest competition level to lowest, i.e. best to worst. Finally there are ten teams per Level. Thus it is evident that the Level is the closest analogue to the modern Conference. This gives thirty teams per region.

When we start a season teams are ranked within their Level according to their performance the previous year (though this will not be of much import as you will see once the schedule is described). Thus we can refer to any team by their region, level, and pre-season position: S-I-1 down to S-I-10 are the ten teams that compose the top Level in the South Region. And W-III-10 is the last team in the lowest Level of the West Region.

Schedule

Our goal is to foster fan engagement. This requires a familiarity with other regional teams that develops over years. Rivalries spring naturally from proximity and competition. We aim to provide frequent competition between similarly situated schools. But, a sense of where your team stand in the national picture is valuable as well. So inter-regional games are important as well.

We begin the season with a 3-game inter-Regional round. This is developed in the spirit of the Big Ten-ACC challenge of basketball. During this time, each team plays its counterparts from the three other Regions. So the top team in the East (E-I-1) plays the other three top Regional teams ({W,N,S}-I-1). To select another example, S-II-5 plays W-II-5, E-II-5, and N-II-5. This inter-Regional round produces a top-to-bottom assessment of where the Regions stand relative to one another.

After this we begin the 9-week intra-Level season. Each team plays each of the other 9 teams in its Level once for a round robin. This round robin will crown a champion of each of the 12 Levels, with appropriate tie breakers for the case that three or more teams finish with the same record (tie breaker based on the twelve-game record of the common-Level teams beaten by each of the tied teams).

Finally, since there exists a desire to name the single best team each year, we propose a playoff of the four Level I champions. Seeding for this playoff is to be based on the combined win-loss record of all 30 teams in each Region during the inter-Regional round. First round games are to be played at the home stadium of the higher-seeded team. The final will be played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Promotion & Relegation

When the intra-Level season has completed one team will move in each direction over the Level boundaries. That is: the worst team in Level I will move down to Level II, the best team in Level III will move up to Level II, and Level II will see its best and worst teams move to replace those that moved. This allows for a decade-long dramas to play out as teams seek to work up and get moved down the Levels. Also, it ensures a high level of competition exists in the top level even as the strength of individual teams wax and wane.

A team that moves up/down takes the pre-season last/first place for scheduling in their new Level for the inter-Regional round the next year. Thus all the teams promoted to Level I will play each other before taking on the bigger challenges of top-Level play during the intra-Level season. And all the teams that have been booted from Level I play will take each other on before trying to make quick work of their new lower-Level schedule. These types of matchups during the inter-Region round will provide interesting story lines for the excited and apprehensive fans of the promoted teams as well as the more downcast fans of the relegated teams.

Summary

This structure and schedule provides a number of goals toward which a team might work in a season:

  1. Level Championship
  2. National Championship
  3. Promotion/avoiding relegation
  4. Regional pride

In total, this structure and schedule provides many more interesting and competitive games than the current schedule. It satisfies many of the complaints about lack of connectivity between teams that makes it hard to assess their relative strengths. It maintains the sacrosanctity of the regular season while crowning a champion at the end.

Areas that could be improved:

  1. Does nothing to ensure parity between Regions
  2. Performance in inter-Region play means very little. (Though if we are evaluating meaning, none of college football matters much at all)
  3. ? (Let me know)

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