Enough is enough.
We’ve had enough of the clandestine meetings, dramatic announcements and subsequent hand wringing over conference realignment, the expansion of the College Football Playoff, Name, Image and Likeness and the Transfer Portal. Enough with the speculation about the fate of this conference or that one. Enough of the complaining about how College Football has changed – and not for the better.
We get it.
NCAA football is no more.
The “governing body” of college sports has gone AWOL. The power brokers are now Kevin Warren and Greg Sankey. So let’s put them in charge and get the long anticipated College Football Super League rolling already.
Clearly, the dismantling of the current system is already happening before our eyes, brick by painful brick. All of the above factors have combined to make the game many of us grew up loving almost unrecognizable now. (Some, not all) players are getting wealthy taking money from boosters – legally – and aren’t bound to the school they sign their letter of intent with (while getting paid a handsome “signing bonus” from a booster) anymore, regional rivalries are a thing of the past…and nobody likes the four-team play-off anymore, either.
When UCLA is in the same conference with Rutgers, the names at the top of the letterhead have been rendered meaningless. The “Pac 12,” “Big 12” and “ACC” exist now in name only. They’re headed for dissolvement. So why are we still fighting this?
It’s time for the power brokers – Sankey’s Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten, led by Warren – to get together and finish setting up the Super League. Each conference already has 16 school sponsored and booster fueled programs, meaning there are 16 more spots that each needs to fill in order to create a 64-team Super League of “College” (ahem) Football. (None of this is going to affect other sports like Basketball, so the success of Kansas or North Carolina in hoops is basically irrelevant here.)
While it would be sort of nice if they could have geography mean something, when you professionalize the sport as they’ve already done, that stuff goes by the wayside. In the NFL, for example, the two New York teams are in different conferences. So geography be damned. These semi-professional football players can skip meaningless classes for multiple cross country flights. No problem.
So how about a playground style “draft” of programs – from inside and outside the soon-to-be-extinct “Power Five” – that are currently without a secure place to plant their colors? This means Notre Dame and the remaining Pac 12, ACC and Big 12 programs are all in play. As are any Group of Five programs deemed desirable enough for inclusion.
Here’s who’s still on the big board, ranked by desirability. Factors include on-field success, attendance, facilities and of course, size of the television market:
1) Notre Dame 9) Stanford 17) San Diego State 25) Iowa State
2) Clemson 10) Boise State 18) Louisville 26) West Virginia
3) Oregon 11) Arizona State 19) Pitt 27) North Carolina State
4) Florida State 12) Utah 20) North Carolina 28) Texas Tech
5) Washington 13) Syracuse 21) Kansas State 29) Cincinnati
6) Miami 14) Virginia Tech 22) Washington State 30) Arizona
7) Oklahoma State 15) Houston 23) Georgia Tech 31) BYU
8) Baylor 16) TCU 24) Cal 32) Colorado
When the playground picking is over, six current or future “Power Five” programs are left on the sidelines: Wake Forest, Boston College, Oregon State, UCF and perennial basketball powers Duke and Kansas. They will have to play football with the smaller guys from now on.
By virtue of a coin flip, the Big Ten gets first pick, and geography is the big winner early on. Notre Dame, Oregon, Washington, Oklahoma State and Stanford all join the northern-based conference, while Clemson, Florida State, Miami, Virginia Tech and Baylor move to the SEC. After that, things get strange. Boise State finally crashes the party, but lands in the SEC with Utah, Washington State, Cal, West Virginia and team irrelevant, Colorado. The Big Ten – always looking for more TV markets, gets Syracuse, Houston, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati…along with odd fits in San Diego State, Georgia Tech and BYU.
No one said this would make sense. But what about College Football has made sense recently?
Okay, so it might not go down exactly like this, but the much anticipated football breakaway from the do-nothing NCAA needs to happen NOW if anything is ever going to make sense ever again. Go ahead and rip the band aid off already. Get the sweeping changes over with and let’s move on so fans can see if the new version can measure up to the old one.
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