The Deconstruction of Conference Realignment, Part 1

The current setup is unsustainable, and the logical conclusion is the reestablishment of smaller, regional conferences that promote rivalries and increase access to the playoff

Soon, Rutgers will fly across the country to play UCLA at the Rose Bowl in a random, Big Ten snooze-fest. The stadium will be two-thirds empty, and the game will be broadcast on the Big Ten Network. In all likelihood, the college football world will forget about the whole thing within 24 hours of the final whistle. This isn’t what the corporate big-wigs promised us, but it is what we are about to get.

College football attendance has been declining for the better part of a decade now:

While many pundits blame the price of travel and tickets, as well as the ease of watching at home on a giant flat-screen tv, I think one primary factor driving the decline is apathy. There are too many games on the schedule that fans do not care about, and access to the playoff is way too restrictive and open to the subjective opinions of the committee members.

I think there is a better way, and I think it is inevitable that we will get there eventually. Conferences today are so big that they are almost ready to split in two. One day they might. But if they really want to get this thing right, the presidents need to simultaneously look forward and backward. If they do, they will come up with a solution that looks very much like the one I am going to propose in this article. First, though, I will detail the main problem this solution is intended to solve.

What ails the current alignment

College football has been special in this country for more than 100 years because of the closeness between the players, fans, and broader university community. I have never seen a professional player in any sport just out and about, but when I was at Virginia Tech, I saw football players all the time. I had classes with them, played pickup basketball with them, and I even shared a townhouse with one during my junior year. Back then, most of the players were from Virginia or one of the neighboring states, so if backgrounds were sometimes different, at least everyone knew the lay of the land. There was a locality to it all.

Local news outlets, especially print newspapers, have been struggling for some time, but the local beat writers have long played an important part in fostering a sense of community around college football programs. Throw in the fans - passionate students, locals, and alums - and you have everything it takes for a great college football atmosphere. Well, almost everything.

The one other important ingredient is that the games have to matter. Everyone involved has to care deeply about the results of each and every game. Otherwise, why bother?

And that is the crux of the current situation. There are far too many games about which fans feel indifferent. Buy games are boring, too many conference games are played between teams with limited history, and huge conferences act like a funnel for the playoff. Each year, there are only a handful of teams with any legit shot of making it, and by November, there really is not much drama. Enlarging the playoff will help some, but the effect will be limited by the consolidation of elite teams.

So, the ultimate goal is to make as many games meaningful for as many people as possible.

How to get conferences right

The presidents of the institutions could solve three-quarters of the problem by just splitting the five ginormous power conferences into ten. I think they need to go further, though. Here is my proposal:

• 12 regional conferences with 9 teams in each

• Every team plays 8 conference games (4 at home and 4 on the road)

• The season reverts back to 11 games, so each team will play 3 non-conference games per year

• There are no conference championship games

• The weekend before Thanksgiving is the last week of the regular season

• The playoff comprises 16 teams: 12 conference champions + 4 at-large teams

• Playoff selection and seeding is done by the current CFP committee

• The first two rounds are played on-campus, with the lower seeded team travelling to play at the higher seeded team’s stadium

• First round playoff games are played on Thanksgiving Friday and Saturday (4 games each day)

• Second round playoff games are played the following Saturday (on what is currently Championship Saturday)

• The semifinals and finals are then played as they currently are in the CFP

• Every team with at least six wins that is not playing in the semi-finals is bowl eligible

Here is a map of schools by realigned conference:

In the proposed realignment map above, notice that in only one instance is there a state with schools in different conferences (Michigan - Central Michigan is in the Heartland Conference while all the others are in the Big 10). In every other instance, all the (at least semi-major) FBS schools from each state are in the same conference. Only the worst of the worst (and Notre Dame) retain independent status.

The advantages of realigning in this manner include:

• The schedule would not interfere with finals, the vast majority of players could go home for Thanksgiving, and most teams would play 12 games, with 15 being the max for any particular season

• All primary conference rivalries from the current setup are retained as well as most secondary rivalries

• Three non-conference games each year allows room for any remaining secondary rivalries (perhaps VT would ink annual games with UNC and Miami, or maybe Tech would eschew that in favor of rotating home-and-home series with schools like South Carolina, Penn St., and Pitt)

• Travel times and costs would decrease significantly, saving universities money (especially on Olympic sports) and enabling more fans to travel to road games (further helping attendance and thus the athletic department bottom line and gameday economic impact)

• Bragging rights in the office would return (there are not many workplaces that are highly concentrated with Rutgers and UCLA alums)

• In basketball, the annual home-and-home setup would return, with each team playing eight home and eight away games against conference foes

• One has to imagine such a setup would incentivize recruits to stay in-state, as the hyper-local focus would ensure that each player’s family could attend all conference games without undue burden in time or cost

• Scheduling strategy would likely be similar to how it is for basketball - if the conference is easier to win, then you likely schedule elite non-conference opponents in order to burnish your resume and earn a higher seed (a la Gonzaga in basketball), while mid-major programs would likely focus solely on winning the conference and limiting the risk of injuries during the non-conference portion of the schedule (i.e., avoid playing powerhouses like Alabama and Georgia)

• The playoff would be a truly national phenomena, like the NCAA basketball tournaments, in that teams from all regions of the country would be participating, not just the Southeast and Midwest, as is the case in most years since the advent of the CFP

Would all these new regional conferences be of relatively equal strength? Most would be in the same ballpark, but there would be a few outliers. In terms of FBS win/loss records and win percentage, here is how it looks over the last 25 years (note, some conferences have lower game totals, as they include teams that joined FBS sometime during that 25-year period):

Coming up next week

In part two of this series, I will break down the realigned conferences to reveal the teams in each, project playoff teams had this setup been in effect in 2022, and analyze the impact such an alignment would have on the Virginia Tech football program.