Everyone seems to think the future of college football will have 4 so-called superconferences with 16 teams each that will be essentially what the Power 5 are now. To which I say, why?

If the playoff is expanding to 8 teams, why would we need to restrict how many major conferences there are? Everyone seems so eager to blow up the Big 12 to make the 4 superconferences to make sense of college football for the future, but what if we simply added teams to the major conferences to stem the small conference debates, and we’ll probably end up giving them their own championship, whether it’s official or not. But let’s talk about what small conference teams ACTUALLY make sense to go into major conferences, and what realignment will be needed to make it happen. We will be adding 6 schools not in the power conferences, including Notre Dame, which needs no explanation. We’ll talk about the reasoning behind the other five, before talking about conference alignment and playoff format.

 

The current group of 5 conference teams to be added to power conferences:

 

1. Houston

Houston seems too obvious not to put at #1. They were in the Southwest Conference with Texas, Texas A&M, TCU, Arkansas, etc. They were considered for Big 12 membership very recently. Their basketball program has never been close to replicating the “Phi Slama Jama” era with Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler of the early 80’s but did finally get their first NCAA tournament win since 1984 in 2018, which will help their all-around case for entry into a major conference. But they’re football program is why they’re tops on this list. They were ranked in the final AP poll in 12 out of 23 seasons between 1968 and 1990, mostly while playing in the Southwest Conference, before seeing a decline in the 90’s and early 2000’s. When they hired then-Texas Tech running backs coach Art Briles in 2003 the program saw improvement and has had consistently successful seasons even through that success leading 3 of 4 coaches to leave for power conference jobs in the state (Briles to Baylor in 2007, Kevin Sumlin to Texas A&M in 2011, and Tom Herman to Texas in 2016). Current head coach Major Applewhite appears to have the team in position that they could make the leap to a major conference and survive it. Recruiting in the state of Texas never hurts either.

 

2. San Diego State

I know, I know. How is San Diego State #2? While we’re talking about football right now, not everything is about football, and conferences will pay attention to the all-around aspects of a university and their athletics programs before adding them. San Diego State Baseball and Basketball are both solid programs that will benefit a major conference. But their football program has its own accomplished history too. After enjoying a lot of success as a small school, they finally turned the corner in the Mountain West under Brady Hoke in 2010, going 9-4 and winning their first bowl game since the poinsettia bowl in 1969, and they have had no fewer than 7 wins every year since. They currently play in SDCCU stadium, the former home of the San Diego Chargers, with a capacity of just over 70,000. If they’re able to recruit (who doesn’t want to live in San Diego), they’ll do just fine.

 

3. Boise State

Boise State has felt like a team that’s deserved a chance to be in a major conference for a while. In the 2010-2014 realignment period when Utah, TCU, and Louisville moved up to major conferences, I think what held Boise back was their location (Idaho is terrible for recruiting), their lack of success in other sports, and the newness of the program, combined with people thinking perhaps the strength of the football team leaving with Chris Peterson. Their football team only moved up to the FBS level in 1996, and yet they have racked up 219 wins in 22 years through 2017, averaging about 10 wins per year, and second only to Ohio State (231) in that time. If you start in 2000, their 197 wins are most in the FBS (Oklahoma is #2 at 195, Ohio State 3 with 193). Give the people what they want and let’s see how the Smurf Turf Broncos do against the big boys.

 

4. BYU

BYU has for a long time been considered one of the best small conference football teams in the nation. They’re the most recent team to win a national championship without being in one of the major conferences, having been unanimously ranked #1 in all 4 of the NCAA sanctioned polls despite playing in the WAC at the time (a conference that no longer even plays football), and playing in the Holiday bowl against a 6-5 Michigan team, a far cry from the modern College Football Playoff, or even its predecessor the BCS. Since 1972, when LaVell Edwards took over as head coach, they have a record of 395-180-3, good for a .686 win percentage. In this time, they have won 22 conference championships, the national championship in 1984, and have gone to 35 bowl games, winning 14 of them. They have more historical achievement than just about every other small conference team, so we’ll give them a shot based on that.

 

5. Cincinnati

The final spot. And the toughest to decide. To be honest, I don’t really think Cincinnati belongs in a major conference. But I needed to add 6 teams if I were to get every Power 5 conference to 14 teams, and I couldn’t find anyone better. If Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Wake Forest, and Iowa State can be in Power 5 conferences, why can’t Cincinnati? When the Big East desperately needed teams, Cincinnati was one of the first they called, along with Louisville, who’s now in the ACC and having a pretty good time of it. Cincinnati won 4 Big East championships (2 outright 2 ties) between 2008 and 2012, when the Big East stopped fielding football. They went to 13 bowl games between 2000 and 2015, and their basketball team is good enough to play pretty well in a power conference as well, so I feel more confident that they will be able to handle the move up than other teams I had considered for this spot.

 

 

New Conference Alignments

Rather than just taking Notre Dame, Houston, San Diego State, Boise State, BYU and Cincinnati and just throwing them into the conferences that currently don’t have 14 teams (PAC 12 and Big 12), we’re going to try to use some reasoning and logic to set up the conferences. This will not be restarting the conferences, and there will be as little change as possible, but some minor adjustments will be needed to make these conferences work.

Teams are listed alphabetically in their divisions. Teams that changed conference or division are bold.

 

Big Ten and SEC – Unchanged

 

Big Ten East:

Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers

Big Ten West:

Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern, Purdue, Wisconsin

 

SEC East:

Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vanderbilt

SEC West:

Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU, Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Texas A&M

 

ACC and PAC 12 (Now PAC 14?) – Minor Changes

 

ACC Atlantic:

Boston College, Clemson, Florida State, North Carolina State, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Wake Forest

ACC Coastal:

Duke, Georgia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, Notre Dame, Virginia, Virginia Tech

The ACC, like most other conferences, has had problems with a lack of balance between their divisions, so rather than slot another football power in Notre Dame into the Atlantic that already features Clemson and Florida State, we’ll put them in the Coastal division to give Miami competition and have more assurance that the division champion will be competitive in the championship game. Louisville and Pittsburgh were the newest members, and Pittsburgh would have a worse geographical fit in the Big 12, so Louisville was the one to go.

 

PAC 14 North:

Boise State, California, Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, Washington, Washington State

PAC 14 South:

Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, San Diego State, UCLA, USC, Utah

What we’ll now call the PAC 14 was the obvious choice for San Diego State and Boise State, their divisions make sense, so we left them alone.

 

Big 12 – Big Change

They haven’t had divisions in the Big 12 since 2010, and even though they had a North-South division setup from their founding in 1996 until then, I think that with the current members that will create an imbalance of power in favor of the south, so we’ll split them East-West.

Big 12 East:

Cincinnati, Iowa State, Kansas State, Louisville, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, West Virginia

Big 12 West:

Baylor, BYU, Houston, Kansas, TCU, Texas, Texas Tech

Yes, I’m splitting up Oklahoma from Texas and Kansas from Kansas State. Yes, I can do that. They’ll have protected rivalries. Plus, with these divisions we could get an Oklahoma-Texas Big 12 Championship game which would be great for the conference. The East might still be slightly weaker overall, but it had to make geographical sense, and I think that’s better than a North-South setup that would’ve essentially switched Kansas and BYU for Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.

 

So those are the power 5 conferences. If your favorite small conference team didn’t make it, I’m sorry. There’s as little hope for them to get into the 8-team playoff that we’ll be detailing next as there is the current 4-team playoff in real life. But you can always declare yourself national champions and throw a parade through Disney World if you want to. We can debate what conference is the best and which one is the worst, who benefits most from this, and all that, but for a hypothetical situation I’m not interested in that. Let’s get to the playoff setup.

 

8-Team Playoff Format

First of all, all the Power 5 conference champions are getting in. They will be an automatic qualifier, period. This will create drama at times, but it makes it so that every conference championship game will matter, and that will be better for the sport and the individual conferences, so no one really loses when having the automatic qualifier. The other three teams, as well as seeding, will be determined still by the playoff committee. The playoff committee will change as well. It will consist of all 5 power conference commissioners, as well as 20 members from the media, with no more than 3 having an affiliation with any one conference (affiliation to a school or conference includes attending the school, coaching at the school, writing for the school, writing for the conference and working for the conference). They will list a top 25, and the top 3 teams that are not power conference champions will get the three at-large bids. The New Years six bowl games will remain intact, only they will no longer be played around January 1^st. Instead, the 4 quarterfinals of the playoff will be played on the Friday and Saturday before Christmas, and the other two of the six will be the new group of 5 tournament, and they will be played the Thursday before Christmas. It will not be listed as its own championship, it will simply be a sort of bowl tournament to have an unofficial group of 5 champion. If basketball can have regular season tournaments, then we can have a tournament that doesn’t crown its winner a champion of the league. The 4 highest ranked teams in a small conference not invited to the playoff will be invited, and if there are not 4 small conference teams in the playoff committee’s final poll, then they will also name the next best small conference teams to set that field. On the last Friday in December they will have their unofficial championship game, which we’ll call the Group of 5 Bowl Tournament Championship (that can change, it sounds kind of clunky), at a different site each year. On the last Saturday in December the College Football Playoff Semifinals will be held at bowl game site, and the Monday of the next week will be when the College Football Playoff National Championship Game (wow that’s clunky too) will be played at rotating sites.

 

The playoff will inevitably expand to increase revenue for all those involved, hopefully soon including the players, and we may see college football’s organization change a bit as we go forward. This is one idea of a scenario of what college football may look like in the future. Is it likely? Probably not. But I like this idea, and this is part one of a series of ideas for what the future of FBS football could look like, and we’ll explore other possibilities as the series goes forward. But for now, I give you the Power 5 conference setup getting reaffirmed and bolstered with some new additions, and Notre Dame finally in a conference. Until next time,

CM

 

Statistics and historical info courtesy of sports-reference.com