As a Pac-10 student in the early 2000s, with an eight-game conference schedule, a conventional four-year student was guaranteed a home game against every other team in the conference, and two against all but one of them.
And by the by, the tidy double regional groupings meant that come basketball season, you'd play U of Blank on Thursday and Blank State on Saturday (there were no games on any other days).
Regional identity is--was--the sine qua non of major college athletics. I root for the same team grandpappy did; I vocally (yet peacefully) hate the same cross-state rival he did.
Everything sucks and I hate it. Make it 1993 again via science or magic. No stupid-ass ever-expanding playoff--we vote on who we think is best and argue about it all offseason. The Rose Bowl Game is between the Pac-10 champion and the Big Ten champion, because that's just definitionally what that exhibition game (not playoff semifinal) is. The return of the classic negative-space Big Ten logo. Etc. RIP to it all.
Third generation Pac-8/10/12 graduate and couldn’t agree more with Sharty! I get the relegation analogy, but this isn’t professional sports. Although I suppose that’s my mistake—it is professional sports now.
I don't care about playing the best teams. I almost exclusively care about playing the teams we always play and have always played.
The relegation model is predicated on the assumption that the goal of the league(s) is to conclusively identify the best team. That's a perfectly fine goal, if that's what you want your goal to be. It's not my goal.
Oh, absolutely, I'm totally hosed. I'm glad I've accidentally lined up multiple home games this year (both trophy games!), because I don't think I'm going to feel a particular affinity for the Big Ten after this final normal-ish season.
College football has most games in September and October…so most games in the SEC will have awful weather while the Big 10 will have classic fall football weather.
Relegation is also in professional sports. This is college, where athletes have to attend class. The travel schedules here are gonna be brutal for the West Coast teams and the East Coast teams that have to travel to them.
The Big Ten contains Washington and Maryland now. But yes, this kind of thing will be more common.
So what I'd be prepared to do now is not require college athletes to attended classes concurrently with their playing career. They could, but they could also use their scholarship after their eligibility is expired. This is probably a bridge too far for a lot of people.
I think student athletes can take a lot of class online. Just in the name of research I read about that LSU gymnast and she says she can’t go to classes anymore and takes them online.
Especially in the context of a sport that has independent match-ups as well.
Not a College Football fan so I'll be playing this College Football Czar on extremely easy mode but based on the numbers you could have five conferences that each had 26 or 27 programmes within them. Each conference is then divided into three leagues with promotion and relegation between them (say two up, two down). That means each side gets eight league games a season (4 home, 4 away) with four games they schedule independently (3 on uniform dates, 1 on their specific rest week). That way promotion/relegation and more rigid conference allocation doesn't stop the popular sides having marquee matches during the season.
Using the proposed the new 12-team playoff format, that would have the top two sides in each conference's premier league progressing to the national play-offs whilst the two best third-place sides are chosen as wild-cards by the selection panel.
You basically create the same structure as European soccer leagues where sides are fighting to win the championship (conference league title), secure champions league qualifaction (play-off qualification) or promotion (promotion from conference league two or three to league above), and avoid relegation (relegation from conference league one or two to the league below). That would greatly strengthen the narrative intrigue of the sport as it would be very rare for teams in the top two teams to have dead games until the very end of the season.
And of course by organising the conferences into coherent structure you could actually sell the rights as an entire package rather than letting the broadcasts play the conferences against each other. You could do like the English Premier League and have the money each conference earns from the TV deal be a combination of sporting merit and commercial power.
This is interesting! A couple of questions it raises for me:
- What benefit is derived from the 4 non-conference games? Presumably in this scenario conference record (in the 8 games) is what determines the top two spots in that conference that go into the playoff. So it doesn’t really matter who you schedule or if you win in the non-conference games (unless maybe you happen to end up in the wildcard bucket but the odds of that are pretty slim). Do those games just become effectively exhibitions? Note that if you did make those games count in the standings teams would just schedule cupcakes, unless you made the schedule dynamic such that the first place team in each conference in a given year must play the other conferences’ four first place teams (a la the NFL). That would be amazing but probably provides a strong 3rd place team from the prior season with a better path to the playoff than a 1st place team. It also means you’d remove all scheduling flexibility.
- If 1 and 2 in the conference automatically go to the playoff, what is the point of the conference championship game?
If this were relegation Mississippi State wouldn’t be in the SEC…they are pulling a George Constanza and napping under their desk hoping nobody notices them. ;)
But then we would be deprived of a close, passionate rivalry game that was lost because a player pretended to be a dog taking a piss. And that would be a net loss for the sport and for society as a whole.
Of course it's yuuugely overdetermined, but I think you can make a case (if you want) that it's all Miami's fault for being so inept after the early 2000s. The collapse of the Big East as a serious football conference was highly destabilizing.
And I'm invested in making that case, because I detest Miami. Turnover chain my fucking ass.
I looked into that a few months ago…what did Miami in was for most of Florida’s history the state only had 3 division 1 programs. And so first was UCF to enter in the 1990s and they landed Culpepper pretty quickly! And then FIU and FAU and USF became division 1 and new stadiums were built and coaches with pedigrees hired…and Miami stopped getting so many top recruits. That’s my theory anyway.
I attribute it in large part to the proliferation of VHS. Miami could completely own south Florida recruiting so long as it was necessarily an in-person experience. Once you could mail tapes around, and people started realizing this was a thing you could and should do, you couldn't lock down talent the same way anymore.
Oh, and definitely this is easy mode solution. I guess you'd need a mega conference with 20 teams or so to implement an upper and lower league instead of equal divisions. Then in following years that conference could invite more teams to join or whole conferences could align. Assigning teams to an initial level seems difficult though.
I fundamentally disagree with you that this wasn't inherently about greed/TV Dollars. Yes, I agree that it has a few ancillary benefits, but I don't for a second think that those were the main reason that these decisions happened.
But I also think it's beside the point. I think that over the course of the next decade, we can find out whether or not some core beliefs of a lot of college football fans about themselves are actually true: namely that most of what they love about the sport is the tradition, rivalries, regionalism, and the fact that it's _not_ just a mini NFL.
These are all stories fans tell themselves repeatedly, and if it's true, then these moves, in the long term, might be the death-knell for the sport since it erodes every one of those and is just another step to becoming NFL lite. If they don't care about any of those, then sure, maybe this will end up making a lot more money for the most valuable brands.
To whatever extent it is true that one believes that college football should be about amateur student athletes, and that tradition, rivaly, etc are important and should be maintained and not sacrificed to get more money, then here is the (magic wand...._really_ really big magic wand) plan I would implement. If one doesn't care about those things, then this would be a terrible plan that admittedly sacrifieces other things. It would also never, in a million years, happen.
1. Create an actual NFL minor league completely divorced from CFB
2. Disallow exclusive broadcast rights. Anyone who is willing to pay whatever fee you decide on gets to broadcast your games.
And then from, that I'm pretty sure the rest would follow. With an NFL minor league, all the issues around "player professionalism" mostly evaporate, and without exclusive contracts, my bet is that total revenue _dramamatically_ falls which means that the unfairness of making billions on the backs of student athletes goes away. It ends up looking like most other non-revenue college sports. At that point, decisions that get made are going to be mostly for the sake of the school/athletes teams.
In my personal opinion, this could easily include "scheduling exciting matchups" (although I never understood why CFB non conference games were scheduled so far in advance anyways, which made strong non conference games a crap shoot. Who knows if the team you just scheduled will still be good in a decade? It's weird.)
Anyways, as this makes clear, I'm _very_ much on team "TV Money is bad for the sport", so my plan basically revolves around removing as much of it as is feasibly possible. The NFL minors are just to give players with the talent to play in the NFL a way to play and get paid, since I'm basically taking that away from CFB.
Now, completely aside from the fact that this plan would _never ever ever_ happen, if it turns out that the average CFB fan doesn't care about any of that, and just cares about seeing their own team on TV every once in a while (which is a _very_ distinct possibility), then this would be a pretty bad plan.
It's instructive to note *why* this wouldn't work. As we see in basketball, plenty of prospects will continue to go to college for the exposure to potential fans, even with alternatives existing before the NIL era. Without fans, or the existing tradition of Minor League Baseball, an NFL minor league might not be worth it, at least if it plays in the fall (the XFL and USFL seem to be doing okay). And TV money being the problem effectively means college football is a victim of its own popularity. Because people want to see their teams and see the games, networks can make a lot of money selling ads, subscriptions, and the right to carry the channel with the games. And I have every expectation the current round of realignment won't change that, because what really attracts people to college sports is the same tribal attraction to your team that drives pro sports. It's just that pro sports is a cartel that restricts itself to the biggest cities, so mid- and smaller cities resort to investing college teams with the importance of pro ones.
The solution? Promotion and relegation in *pro* sports, so every city and town that can support a team can have one, and every city can support a team that at least has the illusion of eventually competing with the best teams in the sport, rather than a weak simulacrum thereof. Couple that with a parallel player development system similar to European soccer or Canadian hockey. Then maybe college sports can get back to their original goal of nurturing bodies and minds while serving as a fun pastime at the center of campus life but no more than a curiosity for anyone without a personal connection to the school.
Edit: But of course, that's even more unlikely than your proposal. Though I do think it would greatly clarify the conundrum of pro sports' antitrust situation.
Basketball players were continuing to go to college under the old paradigm of exclusive TV broadcast rights. I think that getting rid of exclusive broadcast rights _dramatically_ decreases the value of broadcasting games (that's the entire reason I included it as a part of the plan), which has a ton of downstream affects. If it's less valuable, fewer places broadcast it (and almost certainly not primetime network slots), and the "exposure" value of going to a college team will dramatically decrease.
My hope/dream is that it would mean ads were so much less valuable that we would _finally_ get away from these 4+ hour game times. Broadcast would decrease in value so much that the majority of revenue was coming from ticket sales again so teams would go back to optimizing the in person experience. Hopefully cheap internet broadcasts would still exist for fans who couldn't attend in person. Although admittedly, those would probably look a lot more like current internet FCS broadcasts with only a few camera angles, but even as someone who almost exclusively watches CFB on TV, I'd take it.
If it's no longer primetime, then the value of attending a college team (where you won't get paid) vs. a minor league team (where you will), starts become a lot more iffy if you didn't want to go to that college already.
-edit- again, to be clear, this plan has less than a snowballs chance in hell of ever happening. I am under zero illusions about it's likelihood. And if I was actually ever in some position of influence to propose reform in the real world (also never gonna happen), this is not the plan I would suggest. This is my "I have a magic wand" plan, not my "realistic way to reform the sport" plan. But, if I did have that wand, I do think it has a decent chance of working, although it's _very_ hard to predict how changes this large would actually play out so I won't pretend that it's a certainty.
Even if *no* college basketball games were televised, if fans in college towns continued to invest college teams with the importance of pro ones, basketball players would be looking at a lot more exposure in college than in a developmental league.
The NBA is a basketball player’s side gig…selling shoes is their real job. So having Duke or UNC of Kentucky or Michigan or Kansas by their name improves their brand…and now with NIL they can make good money while in college.
I think that's hard to say without seeing it. I suppose it's possible, but, assuming you _have_ an explicitly developmental league, one that's actually officially affiliated with the pro league, I have a hard time believing that you aren't more likely to successfully move up from the developmental league than you are from a college team.
I'm not a baseball fan, but my understanding is that the vast majority of college players who go into the MLB go through the feeder system _first_, even if they don't spend too much time there. Assuming that's actually the case, any player that _could_ go directly into the feeder system presumably would.
I've got to imagine that, while exposure to a few tens of thousands of people (~100K in the _very_ largest of college fandoms) isn't worth nothing.....being able to do no school at all and concentrate _entirely_ on football has to be pretty helpful to development and therefore likelihood of moving up.
But like I said, it's hard to predict exactly how changes this big would play out.
Minor league baseball is successful, and sees players regularly join it right out of high school, because it actually has fans, because it has a long history that predates its co-opting by the majors to serve as a developmental system, and thus a history that fans can latch on to even if their current status makes a mockery of that (though the recent reorganization of the minors didn't help). The G League doesn't have that. The fans of the NBA stars of tomorrow are following college basketball, because they feel like they have a connection to the schools and the history of each team. Take away TV coverage and college basketball would still serve as the equivalent of MiLB, not the G League. That's not to say *no* players would jump straight to the G League, but significantly more basketball and football players with pro dreams would probably go to college than play college baseball, and the number of college baseball players who make it to the bigs is pretty significant as it is.
Jim Delany once commented, pre-NIL, that if the players were going to actually get paid then the Big Ten might shrug and go D-III.
And I was like--cool, that's fine! I cheer for the name on the front, not the name on the back. If the best prospects want to skip the college illusion and go into a semipro developmental league, that's totally alright.
I think minor-league pro football separate from actual college athletics would be a better equilibrium than what we have or are approaching now, but I don't know how you get there from here.
I suspect that's a fairly common sentiment in this comment section.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that my personal ideal version of college football is not possible to get to from where we currently are unless the sport has a complete collapse. Which. even though I _do_ think the current path is bad for the sport, is pretty damn unlikely.
There is a reason the Masters motto is “a tradition like no other”….most of our sports traditions have been undermined by TV and money. The Rose Bowl…nobody cares with the playoffs. Oh, and the Masters isn’t a PGA event and so it wasn’t involved in the LIV Golf nonsense.
We’re ten-fifteen years away from the power football programs breaking away from the NCAA and starting a College Football League, going back to regional conferences in other sports. ADs will pay to send their non-rev sports across the country for a little while, but do we really think sending Iowa volleyball to Eugene is going to be sustainable in the long term?
That’s also not to mention the fact that some schools will start to decide the benefits of having big time college football no longer outweigh the financial (CTE lawsuits/adverse NLRB decisions) and reputational risks of it. We’ve seen literature out of the academy that intercollegiate athletics (in particular football and men’s basketball) is inherently exploitative.
Are schools really going to want to be balancing the budgetary demands of the non-revenue, predominantly white sports, on the unpaid labor of young black men? How does Title IX fit into all of this? Some will decide to move down a level in football to right-size budgets once they’ve missed the boat on these TV deals. Others will drop it entirely.
Separate football from other sports, so football conferences are only for football and general sports conferences continue for other sports.
Four regional football conferences. Every D1FBS team is a member of one conference as of right based on the state they are in. All 50 states are allocated to a conference.
The conferences would be roughly pac 12, big 12, sec, big 10, with the NE added to the big 10. Sec adds Florida State, Miami, Georgia Tech, Duke and UNC, big 12 gets all of Texas and Oklahoma back, and Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Not sure if Virginia should be sec or big 10.
To deal with there being too many teams in each conference, you just have promotion and relegation, probably with the lower levels becoming smaller regions.
The simplest playoff system is to just have the four champions, but that won't generate enough money or enough arguments, so.
Four New Year's playoff games in bowl venues, each with one conference champion involved. Their opponents are the winners of games involving the eight wild cards, chosen by committee (these could include a promoted div2 champion). Those games should be just after the regular season, and the losers would be bowl-eligible.
National semi finals at bowl venues (six big bowls, each hosts a qf two years in three and an sf the other year). Should be about a week into January.
National final the week between the afc/nfc championship games and the super bowl.
4 major conferences of 16 teams each. 4 conference of "mid major" conferences 16 teams each. 128 schools out of the 133. Norte Dame stays independent. Other 4 teams can be independent or drop down to FCS. Each major school has to schedule one mid major non conference and 2 major non conference opponent each year. 12 team playoff with major champs 1st round bye. Mid major champs auto qualify. 4 at large bids based on computers and committees. 1st round games at schools then bowls for rest of playoffs. Done
In my view, college football (and, to an even bigger degree, college basketball) have been fundamentally transformed not by the money and the TV rights, but by the reorientation of the sport toward a national audience (which is obviously endogenous). It’s easy to forget, but within my *adult* lifetime, I could not watch my favorite college basketball team (Siena) on TV for more than 2 or 3 games a season. Prior to about 1998, I could not even *listen* to their games on the radio unless I was within reach of the local radio station in Albany that broadcast them. I think it’s pretty obvious how the national audiences for football/basketball games have brought in additional revenue, but I think it’s less appreciated how it has changed the way fans understand the sports themselves. When you had to go to the game in order to see it, and you have to be local in order to hear it, your team had not only a lower national profile among people out in the nation, but also *a lower national profile/character* among the people who rooted for the team. The cascading effect of this was to make rivalry games more important, conference tournament championships more important, regular season titles more important, and Tuesday night against Iona more important. The explosion that has crushed things, in my world, was not the $50 gazillion the SEC gets for it’s games, it’s that every MAAC basketball game is available on ESPN+, every night, no matter where I live. That’s undeniably great for me---I don’t live locally in the Albany NY media market anymore---but it also means I think about Siena in a much more national sense. 30 years ago, I probably just start going to George Mason games here in Fairfax.
This is obvious to see with mid-major college basketball, because it’s so stark. But I think the same thing is true of power conference college basketball and the big-time college football. A nationalized sport is going to be fixated on national championships, playoffs, and definitive winners, not to mention transfer portals and all the rest. The old system was ok with tie games, pre-determined bowls, and no playoff system precisely because the fans were highly localized and highly local in outlook.
We aren’t going back. That’s lamentable---college basketball is basically ruined if you are a mid-major fan, and I think mostly ruined outside of the tournament---but it’s reality. People talk about rivalries having historical tradition, but the truth is that most of the rivalry’s have fallen apart naturally. The Duke-UNC game is a shell of it’s former self. USC-Norte Dame barely feels like anything. Yes, the Iron Bowl and Michigan-OSU and Army-Navy and such are still amazing, but even those aren’t what they were in the 80s.
I don’t have a specific solution, but a lot of what I hear is geared toward trying to preserve old-fashion college football from the 80s. I think that’s exactly the wrong mentality to bring to this. No one is a sports fan the way they were in the 80s. That’s mostly for the better; a lot of what we miss is a small part of what the overall experience was. But the things people are trying to hold onto aren’t variables you can adjust, because they aren’t downstream from reversible decision, but rather from the march forward of technological progress in the world of media/entertainment. And you just have to accept that.
Can we just skip to the part where it's all one big conference except with the new blood schools in and the underperformers out, so we can start dividing it into conferences that make sense again?
Slightly off-topic but Nate makes the joke about playing College Football Czar but why haven't real-life sports management games been a bigger thing in American Sports? Football Manager for soccer is a huge game that gets big-time updates every year and is a lot of fun, especially as you get older and lack the *ahem* youthful hands needed to excel at more kinetic sports games. Surely they'd be interest in games where you could be the manager/coach of American sports teams?
You can play the kinetic sports games that way if you like and actually watch your team play. Americans tend to prefer things that stimulate their senses more.
Easy mode: Teams are forbidden from using airplanes to get to conference games. Play teams you can drive to or push for a faster train (see how much faster high speed rail projects get done now)
Also athletes have to graduate with four year degrees, and not be given special easy grading, or the program is fined $1 million per athlete who does not.
Oh, also, any player who receives a TBI or the like has to be taken care of for life out of the TV revenue. If making $ comes at the expense of the young people it’s not a net positive.
Go into Orbitz and take a look at some October itineraries from Eugene to play Rutgers (NYC or EWR), Penn State (State College), Indiana (Bloomington, which is close-ish to IND and CVG), Iowa City, Champaign, or East Lansing. They’re brutal. UW is in slightly better shape but not much.
This is a logistics disaster for all of the West Coast teams, especially Oregon.
No, he kind of can't. This is a matter of space & time, not money. Phil Knight's planes are hangared here at Hillsboro Airport (I live 4 miles away), along Brookwood Parkway near the library. He's got some G6s in there but they won't be enough to transport the team (100+ people). So, that's out.
Sure, he could fund charter planes from EUG to wherever the Ducks are playing, but a) those are expensive (probably $200-250K per cross-country trip), b) not always available in a smaller location like EUG, and c) there's still the matter of time in flight. Traveling to Pullman or Tucson is a matter of a couple of hours. Traveling to Newark, Baltimore, or State College is 5-6 hours each way.
Give me easy mode and I'm organizing teams into geographically compact groups of 7 for a conference round robin, with some nod to history and rivalries, and telling them if they don't like it that's why they have half the season to do whatever they want with.
If it's hard mode all I'm trying for is to get travel costs and (student-)athlete's sleep schedules taken into consideration - and maybe, if I'm really convincing, bring in the idea of double round robin conference play in basketball.
Stop making minor league NFL players have to pretend to attend college.
Pay players actual salaries determined by a market.
You can still have teams affiliated with schools. They play there, wear their uniform, hook up with students, do NIL deals with local businesses, etc.
Along with salaries and insurance, grant the players the right to attend that school (or any of a host of colleges) whenever in their lives they want to, should they want to. But they do not have to pretend to be currently taking courses and they fully benefit financially from all the money coming in.
Granted, the trauma of embracing capitalism (and not sufficiently valuing education) will be brutal for some older fans in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, etc., but they'll survive.
The death knell was the PAC-12's eagerness to cancel the football season in 2020, while the SEC and other conferences worked to figure out protocols for safe play. The message that sent to every elite high-school athlete was that the PAC-12 really didn't care about football very much.
I can assure you, Larry Scott did far worse things then that. Considering the B1G made the first move and then walked it back, I don’t think anyone should criticize the Pac when they followed suit.
Alignment is one thing but my issue is with the new playoff. You're going to have teams that lost all their big games making the playoff. So you're not adding more big games, you're just moving some big games to neutral sites at the end of the year.
Everyone picks 3-5 rivals to play regularly. These are dispersed throughout the semester. The rest of the games played with a Swiss-style tournament. Some kind of conference or distance based tie breaking rule to decide the matchups between teams with the same record
Eventually the blue blood schools will look at their current lower performing members like Vanderbilt or Indiana and wonder why they are in the BIG/SEC. They could either try to kick them out like the Big East kicked out Temple, or top 20-30 programs will secede and form a super conference. I predict the latter and I'll explain why.
Because money drives realignment, conferences will continue to get picked apart like the SWC. I see two end states. The first state will just be a FOX league (BIG) and an ESPN league (SEC). All the other leagues will get much less money and the divide between the Big 12+ACC and the AAC, Sunbelt, MAC, CUSA, Mountain West will shrink while the money going to the BIG and SEC grows.
The BIG and SEC will try to get more money in the next cycle but with streaming not being the money maker people thought, ESPN may not have the money for the rights deal and it will just be FOX. With only one bidder, the only way for the blue bloods to increase the revenue per program is to combine forces and bid as one super conference to FOX and become NFL Light.
P.S. I would love relegation, but I don't think it will be allowed in any TV contract so it won't happen since TV money runs College Football.
I feel like the networks would be in favor of relegation and it's the blue bloods that don't want to risk it. Can you imagine how intense the games to get promoted into the top division would be?? And the teams fighting to not get relegated? I would watch the shit out of that no matter what teams are playing.
The Big 12 should just start doing it's own promotion and relegation with the Mountain West and PAC leftovers. It would guarantee competitive games at the top level and then added on excitement of who's in or out at the end of each year.
The TV networks have shown they want more helmet games. MAYBE they could be convinced that relegation games would draw enough eyeballs to justify potentially losing helmet game inventory, but I think TV networks are generally risky averse.
Different leagues have different rights agreement so both the Mountain West and the Big 12 would have to negotiate their rights together for promotion/relegation between the leagues to work. That strikes me as incredibly unlikely.
The most likely scenario for relegation would be for a large league to implement the system with it's own teams. Say you are a league that has an unwieldy 18 members (I know crazy right?). For non-football sports, you split the conference into east-west regions and have little to no cross region travel to cut down on costs to non-revenue sports. In football, you split into an upper and lower division with promotion and relegation only affecting football. Have the worst team in the upper division play the best team in the lower division in a neutral site December bowl that you can sell to TV networks desperate for content during this time of the year. The upper and lower division teams would probably need to play some in football to preserve annual rivalries. Having said all that, despite this system making the most sense it is extremely unlikely to happen.
Indiana could well punch above its weight in terms of the revenue it brings to the conference even if it isn't that strong on the football field. Indiana is a sizable state, and IU has the second-largest alumni base of any school in the entire country: https://www.universitymagazine.ca/the-biggest-college-alumni-networks-in-the-u-s/ Out of all the pre-2023 Power 5 schools, I'd say only Rutgers, Vanderbilt, and *maybe* Northwestern and *possibly* West Virginia are truly deadweight.
Alumni base is important only if it translates into TV eyeballs which I don't believe is the case for Indiana. There are plenty of TV eyeballs that watch Ohio State, Alabama, and UT that are not alumni eye balls so is alumni size really that important to realignment?
EDIT: Forgot about Notre Dame which is the obvious example of TV eyeballs driving college sports.
As a Pac-10 student in the early 2000s, with an eight-game conference schedule, a conventional four-year student was guaranteed a home game against every other team in the conference, and two against all but one of them.
And by the by, the tidy double regional groupings meant that come basketball season, you'd play U of Blank on Thursday and Blank State on Saturday (there were no games on any other days).
Regional identity is--was--the sine qua non of major college athletics. I root for the same team grandpappy did; I vocally (yet peacefully) hate the same cross-state rival he did.
Everything sucks and I hate it. Make it 1993 again via science or magic. No stupid-ass ever-expanding playoff--we vote on who we think is best and argue about it all offseason. The Rose Bowl Game is between the Pac-10 champion and the Big Ten champion, because that's just definitionally what that exhibition game (not playoff semifinal) is. The return of the classic negative-space Big Ten logo. Etc. RIP to it all.
Third generation Pac-8/10/12 graduate and couldn’t agree more with Sharty! I get the relegation analogy, but this isn’t professional sports. Although I suppose that’s my mistake—it is professional sports now.
It became professional sports once the schools started accepting huge TV contracts.
I always wonder where that TV money actually goes? Are there individuals at the schools (besides coaches) getting paid millions?
My understanding is that football and MBB are used to subsidize all the Title 9 and Olympic sports.
Yup
Yes, relegation. This is a solved problem really. It's just very American to resist adopting that model that works so well.
I don't care about playing the best teams. I almost exclusively care about playing the teams we always play and have always played.
The relegation model is predicated on the assumption that the goal of the league(s) is to conclusively identify the best team. That's a perfectly fine goal, if that's what you want your goal to be. It's not my goal.
That's fair, but I don't think you're gonna get your way with either realignment or relegation.
Oh, absolutely, I'm totally hosed. I'm glad I've accidentally lined up multiple home games this year (both trophy games!), because I don't think I'm going to feel a particular affinity for the Big Ten after this final normal-ish season.
College football has most games in September and October…so most games in the SEC will have awful weather while the Big 10 will have classic fall football weather.
Relegation is also in professional sports. This is college, where athletes have to attend class. The travel schedules here are gonna be brutal for the West Coast teams and the East Coast teams that have to travel to them.
The Big Ten contains Washington and Maryland now. But yes, this kind of thing will be more common.
So what I'd be prepared to do now is not require college athletes to attended classes concurrently with their playing career. They could, but they could also use their scholarship after their eligibility is expired. This is probably a bridge too far for a lot of people.
I think student athletes can take a lot of class online. Just in the name of research I read about that LSU gymnast and she says she can’t go to classes anymore and takes them online.
Especially in the context of a sport that has independent match-ups as well.
Not a College Football fan so I'll be playing this College Football Czar on extremely easy mode but based on the numbers you could have five conferences that each had 26 or 27 programmes within them. Each conference is then divided into three leagues with promotion and relegation between them (say two up, two down). That means each side gets eight league games a season (4 home, 4 away) with four games they schedule independently (3 on uniform dates, 1 on their specific rest week). That way promotion/relegation and more rigid conference allocation doesn't stop the popular sides having marquee matches during the season.
Using the proposed the new 12-team playoff format, that would have the top two sides in each conference's premier league progressing to the national play-offs whilst the two best third-place sides are chosen as wild-cards by the selection panel.
You basically create the same structure as European soccer leagues where sides are fighting to win the championship (conference league title), secure champions league qualifaction (play-off qualification) or promotion (promotion from conference league two or three to league above), and avoid relegation (relegation from conference league one or two to the league below). That would greatly strengthen the narrative intrigue of the sport as it would be very rare for teams in the top two teams to have dead games until the very end of the season.
And of course by organising the conferences into coherent structure you could actually sell the rights as an entire package rather than letting the broadcasts play the conferences against each other. You could do like the English Premier League and have the money each conference earns from the TV deal be a combination of sporting merit and commercial power.
This is interesting! A couple of questions it raises for me:
- What benefit is derived from the 4 non-conference games? Presumably in this scenario conference record (in the 8 games) is what determines the top two spots in that conference that go into the playoff. So it doesn’t really matter who you schedule or if you win in the non-conference games (unless maybe you happen to end up in the wildcard bucket but the odds of that are pretty slim). Do those games just become effectively exhibitions? Note that if you did make those games count in the standings teams would just schedule cupcakes, unless you made the schedule dynamic such that the first place team in each conference in a given year must play the other conferences’ four first place teams (a la the NFL). That would be amazing but probably provides a strong 3rd place team from the prior season with a better path to the playoff than a 1st place team. It also means you’d remove all scheduling flexibility.
- If 1 and 2 in the conference automatically go to the playoff, what is the point of the conference championship game?
If this were relegation Mississippi State wouldn’t be in the SEC…they are pulling a George Constanza and napping under their desk hoping nobody notices them. ;)
But then we would be deprived of a close, passionate rivalry game that was lost because a player pretended to be a dog taking a piss. And that would be a net loss for the sport and for society as a whole.
The end of that game was so amazing.
Lol. Btw, are we still blaming all of this on Texas and LHN?? Texas somehow destroyed the PAC-12 because a butterfly flapped its wings??
Of course it's yuuugely overdetermined, but I think you can make a case (if you want) that it's all Miami's fault for being so inept after the early 2000s. The collapse of the Big East as a serious football conference was highly destabilizing.
And I'm invested in making that case, because I detest Miami. Turnover chain my fucking ass.
I looked into that a few months ago…what did Miami in was for most of Florida’s history the state only had 3 division 1 programs. And so first was UCF to enter in the 1990s and they landed Culpepper pretty quickly! And then FIU and FAU and USF became division 1 and new stadiums were built and coaches with pedigrees hired…and Miami stopped getting so many top recruits. That’s my theory anyway.
I attribute it in large part to the proliferation of VHS. Miami could completely own south Florida recruiting so long as it was necessarily an in-person experience. Once you could mail tapes around, and people started realizing this was a thing you could and should do, you couldn't lock down talent the same way anymore.
Oh, and definitely this is easy mode solution. I guess you'd need a mega conference with 20 teams or so to implement an upper and lower league instead of equal divisions. Then in following years that conference could invite more teams to join or whole conferences could align. Assigning teams to an initial level seems difficult though.
I fundamentally disagree with you that this wasn't inherently about greed/TV Dollars. Yes, I agree that it has a few ancillary benefits, but I don't for a second think that those were the main reason that these decisions happened.
But I also think it's beside the point. I think that over the course of the next decade, we can find out whether or not some core beliefs of a lot of college football fans about themselves are actually true: namely that most of what they love about the sport is the tradition, rivalries, regionalism, and the fact that it's _not_ just a mini NFL.
These are all stories fans tell themselves repeatedly, and if it's true, then these moves, in the long term, might be the death-knell for the sport since it erodes every one of those and is just another step to becoming NFL lite. If they don't care about any of those, then sure, maybe this will end up making a lot more money for the most valuable brands.
To whatever extent it is true that one believes that college football should be about amateur student athletes, and that tradition, rivaly, etc are important and should be maintained and not sacrificed to get more money, then here is the (magic wand...._really_ really big magic wand) plan I would implement. If one doesn't care about those things, then this would be a terrible plan that admittedly sacrifieces other things. It would also never, in a million years, happen.
1. Create an actual NFL minor league completely divorced from CFB
2. Disallow exclusive broadcast rights. Anyone who is willing to pay whatever fee you decide on gets to broadcast your games.
And then from, that I'm pretty sure the rest would follow. With an NFL minor league, all the issues around "player professionalism" mostly evaporate, and without exclusive contracts, my bet is that total revenue _dramamatically_ falls which means that the unfairness of making billions on the backs of student athletes goes away. It ends up looking like most other non-revenue college sports. At that point, decisions that get made are going to be mostly for the sake of the school/athletes teams.
In my personal opinion, this could easily include "scheduling exciting matchups" (although I never understood why CFB non conference games were scheduled so far in advance anyways, which made strong non conference games a crap shoot. Who knows if the team you just scheduled will still be good in a decade? It's weird.)
Anyways, as this makes clear, I'm _very_ much on team "TV Money is bad for the sport", so my plan basically revolves around removing as much of it as is feasibly possible. The NFL minors are just to give players with the talent to play in the NFL a way to play and get paid, since I'm basically taking that away from CFB.
Now, completely aside from the fact that this plan would _never ever ever_ happen, if it turns out that the average CFB fan doesn't care about any of that, and just cares about seeing their own team on TV every once in a while (which is a _very_ distinct possibility), then this would be a pretty bad plan.
It's instructive to note *why* this wouldn't work. As we see in basketball, plenty of prospects will continue to go to college for the exposure to potential fans, even with alternatives existing before the NIL era. Without fans, or the existing tradition of Minor League Baseball, an NFL minor league might not be worth it, at least if it plays in the fall (the XFL and USFL seem to be doing okay). And TV money being the problem effectively means college football is a victim of its own popularity. Because people want to see their teams and see the games, networks can make a lot of money selling ads, subscriptions, and the right to carry the channel with the games. And I have every expectation the current round of realignment won't change that, because what really attracts people to college sports is the same tribal attraction to your team that drives pro sports. It's just that pro sports is a cartel that restricts itself to the biggest cities, so mid- and smaller cities resort to investing college teams with the importance of pro ones.
The solution? Promotion and relegation in *pro* sports, so every city and town that can support a team can have one, and every city can support a team that at least has the illusion of eventually competing with the best teams in the sport, rather than a weak simulacrum thereof. Couple that with a parallel player development system similar to European soccer or Canadian hockey. Then maybe college sports can get back to their original goal of nurturing bodies and minds while serving as a fun pastime at the center of campus life but no more than a curiosity for anyone without a personal connection to the school.
Edit: But of course, that's even more unlikely than your proposal. Though I do think it would greatly clarify the conundrum of pro sports' antitrust situation.
Basketball players were continuing to go to college under the old paradigm of exclusive TV broadcast rights. I think that getting rid of exclusive broadcast rights _dramatically_ decreases the value of broadcasting games (that's the entire reason I included it as a part of the plan), which has a ton of downstream affects. If it's less valuable, fewer places broadcast it (and almost certainly not primetime network slots), and the "exposure" value of going to a college team will dramatically decrease.
My hope/dream is that it would mean ads were so much less valuable that we would _finally_ get away from these 4+ hour game times. Broadcast would decrease in value so much that the majority of revenue was coming from ticket sales again so teams would go back to optimizing the in person experience. Hopefully cheap internet broadcasts would still exist for fans who couldn't attend in person. Although admittedly, those would probably look a lot more like current internet FCS broadcasts with only a few camera angles, but even as someone who almost exclusively watches CFB on TV, I'd take it.
If it's no longer primetime, then the value of attending a college team (where you won't get paid) vs. a minor league team (where you will), starts become a lot more iffy if you didn't want to go to that college already.
-edit- again, to be clear, this plan has less than a snowballs chance in hell of ever happening. I am under zero illusions about it's likelihood. And if I was actually ever in some position of influence to propose reform in the real world (also never gonna happen), this is not the plan I would suggest. This is my "I have a magic wand" plan, not my "realistic way to reform the sport" plan. But, if I did have that wand, I do think it has a decent chance of working, although it's _very_ hard to predict how changes this large would actually play out so I won't pretend that it's a certainty.
Even if *no* college basketball games were televised, if fans in college towns continued to invest college teams with the importance of pro ones, basketball players would be looking at a lot more exposure in college than in a developmental league.
The NBA is a basketball player’s side gig…selling shoes is their real job. So having Duke or UNC of Kentucky or Michigan or Kansas by their name improves their brand…and now with NIL they can make good money while in college.
I think that's hard to say without seeing it. I suppose it's possible, but, assuming you _have_ an explicitly developmental league, one that's actually officially affiliated with the pro league, I have a hard time believing that you aren't more likely to successfully move up from the developmental league than you are from a college team.
I'm not a baseball fan, but my understanding is that the vast majority of college players who go into the MLB go through the feeder system _first_, even if they don't spend too much time there. Assuming that's actually the case, any player that _could_ go directly into the feeder system presumably would.
I've got to imagine that, while exposure to a few tens of thousands of people (~100K in the _very_ largest of college fandoms) isn't worth nothing.....being able to do no school at all and concentrate _entirely_ on football has to be pretty helpful to development and therefore likelihood of moving up.
But like I said, it's hard to predict exactly how changes this big would play out.
Minor league baseball is successful, and sees players regularly join it right out of high school, because it actually has fans, because it has a long history that predates its co-opting by the majors to serve as a developmental system, and thus a history that fans can latch on to even if their current status makes a mockery of that (though the recent reorganization of the minors didn't help). The G League doesn't have that. The fans of the NBA stars of tomorrow are following college basketball, because they feel like they have a connection to the schools and the history of each team. Take away TV coverage and college basketball would still serve as the equivalent of MiLB, not the G League. That's not to say *no* players would jump straight to the G League, but significantly more basketball and football players with pro dreams would probably go to college than play college baseball, and the number of college baseball players who make it to the bigs is pretty significant as it is.
Hockey is the interesting one here, and maybe the most desirable-in-a-vacuum pattern to follow.
Jim Delany once commented, pre-NIL, that if the players were going to actually get paid then the Big Ten might shrug and go D-III.
And I was like--cool, that's fine! I cheer for the name on the front, not the name on the back. If the best prospects want to skip the college illusion and go into a semipro developmental league, that's totally alright.
But of course, if they were going to actually do that they'd have been doing it all along...
I think minor-league pro football separate from actual college athletics would be a better equilibrium than what we have or are approaching now, but I don't know how you get there from here.
I suspect that's a fairly common sentiment in this comment section.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that my personal ideal version of college football is not possible to get to from where we currently are unless the sport has a complete collapse. Which. even though I _do_ think the current path is bad for the sport, is pretty damn unlikely.
There is a reason the Masters motto is “a tradition like no other”….most of our sports traditions have been undermined by TV and money. The Rose Bowl…nobody cares with the playoffs. Oh, and the Masters isn’t a PGA event and so it wasn’t involved in the LIV Golf nonsense.
We’re ten-fifteen years away from the power football programs breaking away from the NCAA and starting a College Football League, going back to regional conferences in other sports. ADs will pay to send their non-rev sports across the country for a little while, but do we really think sending Iowa volleyball to Eugene is going to be sustainable in the long term?
That’s also not to mention the fact that some schools will start to decide the benefits of having big time college football no longer outweigh the financial (CTE lawsuits/adverse NLRB decisions) and reputational risks of it. We’ve seen literature out of the academy that intercollegiate athletics (in particular football and men’s basketball) is inherently exploitative.
Are schools really going to want to be balancing the budgetary demands of the non-revenue, predominantly white sports, on the unpaid labor of young black men? How does Title IX fit into all of this? Some will decide to move down a level in football to right-size budgets once they’ve missed the boat on these TV deals. Others will drop it entirely.
The influential Knight Commission agrees with you. https://www.knightcommission.org/2020/12/knight-commission-recommends-a-new-governing-structure-for-the-sport-of-fbs-football/ But I wish they were doing it now. https://www.morganwick.com/2022/12/pining-for-a-true-college-football-super-league/
Watch what happens once the CFP contract expires (2026 I believe?)
Easy mode:
Separate football from other sports, so football conferences are only for football and general sports conferences continue for other sports.
Four regional football conferences. Every D1FBS team is a member of one conference as of right based on the state they are in. All 50 states are allocated to a conference.
The conferences would be roughly pac 12, big 12, sec, big 10, with the NE added to the big 10. Sec adds Florida State, Miami, Georgia Tech, Duke and UNC, big 12 gets all of Texas and Oklahoma back, and Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Not sure if Virginia should be sec or big 10.
To deal with there being too many teams in each conference, you just have promotion and relegation, probably with the lower levels becoming smaller regions.
The simplest playoff system is to just have the four champions, but that won't generate enough money or enough arguments, so.
Four New Year's playoff games in bowl venues, each with one conference champion involved. Their opponents are the winners of games involving the eight wild cards, chosen by committee (these could include a promoted div2 champion). Those games should be just after the regular season, and the losers would be bowl-eligible.
National semi finals at bowl venues (six big bowls, each hosts a qf two years in three and an sf the other year). Should be about a week into January.
National final the week between the afc/nfc championship games and the super bowl.
4 major conferences of 16 teams each. 4 conference of "mid major" conferences 16 teams each. 128 schools out of the 133. Norte Dame stays independent. Other 4 teams can be independent or drop down to FCS. Each major school has to schedule one mid major non conference and 2 major non conference opponent each year. 12 team playoff with major champs 1st round bye. Mid major champs auto qualify. 4 at large bids based on computers and committees. 1st round games at schools then bowls for rest of playoffs. Done
In my view, college football (and, to an even bigger degree, college basketball) have been fundamentally transformed not by the money and the TV rights, but by the reorientation of the sport toward a national audience (which is obviously endogenous). It’s easy to forget, but within my *adult* lifetime, I could not watch my favorite college basketball team (Siena) on TV for more than 2 or 3 games a season. Prior to about 1998, I could not even *listen* to their games on the radio unless I was within reach of the local radio station in Albany that broadcast them. I think it’s pretty obvious how the national audiences for football/basketball games have brought in additional revenue, but I think it’s less appreciated how it has changed the way fans understand the sports themselves. When you had to go to the game in order to see it, and you have to be local in order to hear it, your team had not only a lower national profile among people out in the nation, but also *a lower national profile/character* among the people who rooted for the team. The cascading effect of this was to make rivalry games more important, conference tournament championships more important, regular season titles more important, and Tuesday night against Iona more important. The explosion that has crushed things, in my world, was not the $50 gazillion the SEC gets for it’s games, it’s that every MAAC basketball game is available on ESPN+, every night, no matter where I live. That’s undeniably great for me---I don’t live locally in the Albany NY media market anymore---but it also means I think about Siena in a much more national sense. 30 years ago, I probably just start going to George Mason games here in Fairfax.
This is obvious to see with mid-major college basketball, because it’s so stark. But I think the same thing is true of power conference college basketball and the big-time college football. A nationalized sport is going to be fixated on national championships, playoffs, and definitive winners, not to mention transfer portals and all the rest. The old system was ok with tie games, pre-determined bowls, and no playoff system precisely because the fans were highly localized and highly local in outlook.
We aren’t going back. That’s lamentable---college basketball is basically ruined if you are a mid-major fan, and I think mostly ruined outside of the tournament---but it’s reality. People talk about rivalries having historical tradition, but the truth is that most of the rivalry’s have fallen apart naturally. The Duke-UNC game is a shell of it’s former self. USC-Norte Dame barely feels like anything. Yes, the Iron Bowl and Michigan-OSU and Army-Navy and such are still amazing, but even those aren’t what they were in the 80s.
I don’t have a specific solution, but a lot of what I hear is geared toward trying to preserve old-fashion college football from the 80s. I think that’s exactly the wrong mentality to bring to this. No one is a sports fan the way they were in the 80s. That’s mostly for the better; a lot of what we miss is a small part of what the overall experience was. But the things people are trying to hold onto aren’t variables you can adjust, because they aren’t downstream from reversible decision, but rather from the march forward of technological progress in the world of media/entertainment. And you just have to accept that.
Don’t go watch GMU, we stink
Can we just skip to the part where it's all one big conference except with the new blood schools in and the underperformers out, so we can start dividing it into conferences that make sense again?
This comment is hurtful violence to me as a Minnesota fan.
They're probably in better shape than most of the Big Ten with PJ Fleck on board.
Slightly off-topic but Nate makes the joke about playing College Football Czar but why haven't real-life sports management games been a bigger thing in American Sports? Football Manager for soccer is a huge game that gets big-time updates every year and is a lot of fun, especially as you get older and lack the *ahem* youthful hands needed to excel at more kinetic sports games. Surely they'd be interest in games where you could be the manager/coach of American sports teams?
Everybody is too busy with Fantasy Football, but you raise an interesting point.
Out Of The Park Baseball
You can play the kinetic sports games that way if you like and actually watch your team play. Americans tend to prefer things that stimulate their senses more.
Easy mode: Teams are forbidden from using airplanes to get to conference games. Play teams you can drive to or push for a faster train (see how much faster high speed rail projects get done now)
Also athletes have to graduate with four year degrees, and not be given special easy grading, or the program is fined $1 million per athlete who does not.
Oh, also, any player who receives a TBI or the like has to be taken care of for life out of the TV revenue. If making $ comes at the expense of the young people it’s not a net positive.
Colorado and Nebraska become independents
Go into Orbitz and take a look at some October itineraries from Eugene to play Rutgers (NYC or EWR), Penn State (State College), Indiana (Bloomington, which is close-ish to IND and CVG), Iowa City, Champaign, or East Lansing. They’re brutal. UW is in slightly better shape but not much.
This is a logistics disaster for all of the West Coast teams, especially Oregon.
No, he kind of can't. This is a matter of space & time, not money. Phil Knight's planes are hangared here at Hillsboro Airport (I live 4 miles away), along Brookwood Parkway near the library. He's got some G6s in there but they won't be enough to transport the team (100+ people). So, that's out.
Sure, he could fund charter planes from EUG to wherever the Ducks are playing, but a) those are expensive (probably $200-250K per cross-country trip), b) not always available in a smaller location like EUG, and c) there's still the matter of time in flight. Traveling to Pullman or Tucson is a matter of a couple of hours. Traveling to Newark, Baltimore, or State College is 5-6 hours each way.
Give me easy mode and I'm organizing teams into geographically compact groups of 7 for a conference round robin, with some nod to history and rivalries, and telling them if they don't like it that's why they have half the season to do whatever they want with.
If it's hard mode all I'm trying for is to get travel costs and (student-)athlete's sleep schedules taken into consideration - and maybe, if I'm really convincing, bring in the idea of double round robin conference play in basketball.
College Football Master Plan?
Stop making minor league NFL players have to pretend to attend college.
Pay players actual salaries determined by a market.
You can still have teams affiliated with schools. They play there, wear their uniform, hook up with students, do NIL deals with local businesses, etc.
Along with salaries and insurance, grant the players the right to attend that school (or any of a host of colleges) whenever in their lives they want to, should they want to. But they do not have to pretend to be currently taking courses and they fully benefit financially from all the money coming in.
Granted, the trauma of embracing capitalism (and not sufficiently valuing education) will be brutal for some older fans in Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, etc., but they'll survive.
The death knell was the PAC-12's eagerness to cancel the football season in 2020, while the SEC and other conferences worked to figure out protocols for safe play. The message that sent to every elite high-school athlete was that the PAC-12 really didn't care about football very much.
I can assure you, Larry Scott did far worse things then that. Considering the B1G made the first move and then walked it back, I don’t think anyone should criticize the Pac when they followed suit.
Alignment is one thing but my issue is with the new playoff. You're going to have teams that lost all their big games making the playoff. So you're not adding more big games, you're just moving some big games to neutral sites at the end of the year.
Everyone picks 3-5 rivals to play regularly. These are dispersed throughout the semester. The rest of the games played with a Swiss-style tournament. Some kind of conference or distance based tie breaking rule to decide the matchups between teams with the same record
Eventually the blue blood schools will look at their current lower performing members like Vanderbilt or Indiana and wonder why they are in the BIG/SEC. They could either try to kick them out like the Big East kicked out Temple, or top 20-30 programs will secede and form a super conference. I predict the latter and I'll explain why.
Because money drives realignment, conferences will continue to get picked apart like the SWC. I see two end states. The first state will just be a FOX league (BIG) and an ESPN league (SEC). All the other leagues will get much less money and the divide between the Big 12+ACC and the AAC, Sunbelt, MAC, CUSA, Mountain West will shrink while the money going to the BIG and SEC grows.
The BIG and SEC will try to get more money in the next cycle but with streaming not being the money maker people thought, ESPN may not have the money for the rights deal and it will just be FOX. With only one bidder, the only way for the blue bloods to increase the revenue per program is to combine forces and bid as one super conference to FOX and become NFL Light.
P.S. I would love relegation, but I don't think it will be allowed in any TV contract so it won't happen since TV money runs College Football.
I feel like the networks would be in favor of relegation and it's the blue bloods that don't want to risk it. Can you imagine how intense the games to get promoted into the top division would be?? And the teams fighting to not get relegated? I would watch the shit out of that no matter what teams are playing.
The Big 12 should just start doing it's own promotion and relegation with the Mountain West and PAC leftovers. It would guarantee competitive games at the top level and then added on excitement of who's in or out at the end of each year.
The TV networks have shown they want more helmet games. MAYBE they could be convinced that relegation games would draw enough eyeballs to justify potentially losing helmet game inventory, but I think TV networks are generally risky averse.
Different leagues have different rights agreement so both the Mountain West and the Big 12 would have to negotiate their rights together for promotion/relegation between the leagues to work. That strikes me as incredibly unlikely.
The most likely scenario for relegation would be for a large league to implement the system with it's own teams. Say you are a league that has an unwieldy 18 members (I know crazy right?). For non-football sports, you split the conference into east-west regions and have little to no cross region travel to cut down on costs to non-revenue sports. In football, you split into an upper and lower division with promotion and relegation only affecting football. Have the worst team in the upper division play the best team in the lower division in a neutral site December bowl that you can sell to TV networks desperate for content during this time of the year. The upper and lower division teams would probably need to play some in football to preserve annual rivalries. Having said all that, despite this system making the most sense it is extremely unlikely to happen.
Indiana could well punch above its weight in terms of the revenue it brings to the conference even if it isn't that strong on the football field. Indiana is a sizable state, and IU has the second-largest alumni base of any school in the entire country: https://www.universitymagazine.ca/the-biggest-college-alumni-networks-in-the-u-s/ Out of all the pre-2023 Power 5 schools, I'd say only Rutgers, Vanderbilt, and *maybe* Northwestern and *possibly* West Virginia are truly deadweight.
Alumni base is important only if it translates into TV eyeballs which I don't believe is the case for Indiana. There are plenty of TV eyeballs that watch Ohio State, Alabama, and UT that are not alumni eye balls so is alumni size really that important to realignment?
EDIT: Forgot about Notre Dame which is the obvious example of TV eyeballs driving college sports.