Fixing college football

Here is my plan to bring back USC-Notre Dame, Nebraska-Oklahoma, Penn St-Pitt, Kansas-Missouri and other great college football rivalries.

Money has unlocked a new era in college football. Schools now legally can pay players – above the table. An expanded playoff system is driving higher TV ratings. Conferences are expanding to capture bigger TV contracts.

All the changes mean that new teams are getting the chance to compete for titles. What was once the losingest team in college football history, Indiana University, won the championship this year.

While that’s great for many fans (like me - I went to IU for grad school), others are complaining because the shakeup in conferences have destroyed many regional rivalries. I mean, does anyone really want a UCLA vs. Rutgers matchup instead of Oklahoma vs. Nebraska? Many fans would like to see college football restore regional conferences and bring back more traditional rivalries.

Every fan, it seems, has their own plan for what an ideal conference line-up should be. The trouble with most of these wish lists is that they ignore two realities in college football.

• First, the economic pressures that have led to the creation of an 18-team Big Ten and 16-team SEC… and a scramble for other teams and conferences to adjust.

• Second, the fact that these are not simply football teams. They are schools, and administrations like for their schools to associate with what they see as peer academic institutions.

Let’s start with the economics. Bigger conferences can make bigger TV deals when they offer networks a better collection of popular teams. Right now, the Big Ten and SEC dominate college football financially, leading to speculation that they will become “super leagues” that exclude other schools from the top level of college football.

The way I see it, the only chance we have for the return of regional football conferences is for the sport to move beyond its current structure of multiple conferences negotiating their own TV deals. Instead, the top level of college football needs to come together in one, unified super league that then can divide itself into regional divisions.

With one TV contract for all of these schools, this super league can work to restore the regional and traditional rivalries that helped make college football so popular in the first place.

So here is my pitch for a new structure for college football. Before I reveal it, let me tell you what meager qualifications I have to write about this. Back when I was an undergraduate, I was on the faculty committee that oversaw the athletic department at the Big Ten’s Northwestern University. (Northwestern had a post-1960s rule that all faculty committees had to have at least one student member.) I was on the search committee that hired Northwestern’s athletic director, who in turn then hired the coach that took NU to the Rose Bowl, ending the dark ages of Northwestern football.

So I am proud of that. Anyway, that experience introduced me to the business and logistical sides of college sports, which I have continued to follow through my journalism career.

The “big schools” coming together to cut their own TV deal is inevitable. My hope, as a fan, is that they will include enough other schools in their deal to preserve a wide base of support for college football across the country.

So my plan includes the top 64 most valuable college football programs in the country, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. You can see a non-paywalled version of that list here.

Okay, my plan actually includes the top 63 most valuable programs. To make my plan work, I cut the 64^th-rated program in favor of the 66^th. I will explain below.

As anyone who has tried to draft an ideal conference line-up has discovered, making geographically conterminous conferences is tough. They best way to do it is to have a safety valve, if you will - a “miscellaneous” conference that is based on some other unifying factor than geography.

Remember when I wrote above that schools like to hang out with peer academic institutions? That turned out to be the key that unlocked my ideal college football conference map. The Association of American Universities includes 69 of the United States’ top schools, including the entire Ivy League. All but Nebraska in the Big Ten are AAU schools, and Nebraska was one when it joined the conference. Most of the old PAC-12 was AAU, as are many of the members of the ACC. That’s why AAU members Stanford and Cal joined the ACC after the PAC-12’s collapse and they could not get admission into the Big Ten. They wanted to be with AAU schools.

The AAU connections helped drive my ideal college football map, which offers seven, geographically compact conferences, joined by one new, “Big Football” version of the Ivy League. Other than Ivy 2.0, the eight-member conferences have conterminous borders, save for one exception that I made to preserve two great, traditional rivalries.

Eight members for each conference allows each team to play every other member of its conference each year, something that does not happen with today’s conferences. Eight-member conferences also allow for five non-conference games each year. That means more games that allow fans to see how conferences match up against each other.

In my plan, the eight conference champions would advance to the College Football Playoff, along with however many at-large teams the super league would want. So now, here is my proposed line-up to fix college football’s conference problems.

Pacific Conference

• Arizona

• Arizona State

• UCLA

• Cal

• Oregon

• Oregon State

• Washington

• Washington State

The Pacific Conference includes the eight state schools in the old PAC-10 conference, with its two private schools going off to our eighth conference. (More on that in a bit.)

Central Conference

• Utah

• BYU

• Colorado

• Kansas

• Kansas State

• Iowa

• Iowa State

• Missouri

Consider this the northern division of the old Big 12, with BYU joining its in-state rival Utah and Iowa coming over from the Big Ten to pair Iowa State. This conference also revives the classic Kansas-Missouri rivalry. To meet the eight-team requirement, one of the nine schools that fit in this conference geographically had to move south. Given that I did not want to break up any in-state rivalries, or KU-Mizzou, that meant shipping off Colorado or Nebraska. That became an easy choice, however, as it re-establishes what once was one of college football’s great annual rivalries.

Big Eight Conference

• Nebraska

• Oklahoma

• Oklahoma State

• Texas

• Texas A&M

• Texas Tech

• TCU

• Baylor

Nebraska rejoins many of its former Big 12 conference mates in this new conference, re-establishing the annual Nebraska-Oklahoma rivalry. This conference also sees the return of Oklahoma-Oklahoma State’s Bedlam as an in-conference game. I struggled with a name for this conference, so it gets the “Big” moniker, in a nod to Nebraska and Oklahoma’s heyday.

Great Lakes Conference

• Minnesota

• Wisconsin

• Illinois

• Purdue

• Indiana

• Michigan State

• Michigan

• Ohio State

Here lies the heart of the classic Big Ten. To get down to eight schools, Iowa moved west to join its Great Plains neighbors and Northwestern heads off to our eighth conference. Again, more on that in a bit.

Southeast Conference

• Florida

• Florida State

• Alabama

• Auburn

• Ole Miss

• Mississippi St

• LSU

• Arkansas

The SEC splits in this configuration, with Florida State joining Florida to connect with the western schools from the pre-recent-expansion SEC. This maintains in-state rivalries, with four other current SEC schools heading to our next conference.

Appalachia Conference

• Louisville

• Kentucky

• Tennessee

• North Carolina State

• Clemson

• South Carolina

• Georgia

• Georgia Tech

The Georgia schools go here to maintain conterminous geography. Kentucky gets an in-state conference rival with Louisville, while maintaining its rivalry with Tennessee. Clemson-South Carolina becomes a conference game again, as does Clean, Old Fashioned Hate with Georgia and Georgia Tech. The remaining SEC school, the private Vanderbilt, gets its new home, below. But first....

East Coast Conference

• Boston College

• Syracuse

• Penn State

• Pitt

• Rutgers

• Maryland

• Virginia

• Virginia Tech

The old Big East is back, with an eight-team conference that sees Penn State-Pitt back on the annual schedule, as well as a Virginia-Virginia Tech clash. And who else would love to see VT’s James Franklin playing his old school (Penn State) every year here?

That brings us to...

Metropolitan Conference

• USC

• Stanford

• Northwestern

• Notre Dame

• Vanderbilt

• Duke

• North Carolina

• Miami

And finally, to make all the geography above work, we need that “miscellaneous” conference. But there’s a thread here, as all of these are AAU schools, including all six private AAU schools now playing P4 ball, plus AAU member Notre Dame. (Yes, Notre Dame will have to join a conference if it is to participate in this super league.) To make eight members, AAU member North Carolina joins the CFB super league’s version of the Ivy League, preserving its conference rivalry with Duke. Of the other AAU state schools that could have joined here, UNC provided a fit that did not disrupt the geography of the other conferences.

The conference restores the annual USC-Notre Dame game, while also reviving the Notre Dame-Miami “Catholics v. Convicts” game. I also think that USC versus Miami quickly will become one of college football’s great rivalries.

The Northwestern-Notre Dame battle for Chicago becomes an annual event again. And the quartet of Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Duke should prove spicy, as well. With schools in LA, the Bay Area, Chicago, Nashville, and Miami, “Metropolitan” seemed a reasonable name for this conference.

Five non-conference games a year would allow Notre Dame to continue its series against Navy, which is important to the institution. While each school should be encouraged to play out-of-conference within the league, one or two games a year outside the league should be allowed.

Outside the Metropolitan Conference, the other seven conferences are geographically conterminous, save for the Big Eight’s Nebraska joining the Oklahoma and Texas schools. I could have kept conterminous borders for the Big Eight - barely - by including Missouri instead of Nebraska, but I thought that promoting the NU-OU and KU-Mizzou rivalries was more important than creating a perfect map.

My apologies to the University of Central Florida, the 64^th-most valuable team in college football, which I dumped from my proposed super league in favor of 66^th-rated Vanderbilt. I needed Vandy to make the Metropolitan Conference work, and the valuation difference between the schools was minimal, anyway.

I would love to see this be the new system for college football. It restores so many classic rivalries as annual events, while enabling great new, logical match-ups, too.

If your favorite school is not on this list, that is because it did not make the top 64 – err, 66 – team valuation cut-off. Sorry, but at some point, the chaff is getting cut from the wheat in college football, and I just hope that the cut line is 64 teams and not something even smaller. Perhaps with the enticing line-ups I propose here, we can have a 64-team top level for college football that helps preserve the sport’s popularity for generations to come.

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