rags…I haven’t had time to read this yet but I can already tell this is awesome and obviously well thought out!

Hey, this is OT but in my NCAA09 game after winnging 2 NC’s with Notre Dame, the Big10 invited me into their conference to replace Iowa (ouch!)…pretty weird for a video game, huh?

Well done. I’m just going to post the drawbacks of this regional alignment.

Just looking at these, I can already see the big downside—“Every game matters” sure won’t be the mantra anymore.

Southwest: Cal and USC have comically easy schedules (downgrading from the Pac-10 schedule to Fresblow, Nevada, UNLV, Hawaii, and San Diego State provides so many gimmees). There’s a good chance they could face off for the conference crown for the next ten years.
Northwest: This conference is way harder to navigate than the Southwest counterpart. The best from the MWC (Utah and BYU), WAC (Boise), and four strong Pac-10 teams. This conference would be fun to watch, but there’d be automatic protests
Tex-Mex: Same problem as the Southwest. Be prepared for ten straight Texas-Texas Tech conference championship games.
Plains: Oklahoma with an occasional challenge from Okie State vs. Nebraska or other Big 12 scallywag. Decent conference, but Oklahoma probably wins it 9 out of 10, which is no different from the Big 12 I guess.
Great Lakes: Ever wanted to make the Big Ten look weaker than it already is?
Michigan-Ohio: Ohio State vs. Michigan/Michigan St./Notre Dame. For the next 150 years.
Northeast: JoePa might never retire if he gets this conference of patsies.
MidAtlantic: Fairly interesting conference.
South Coast Conference: The Southern conference is really bad. I’d set the line on North -17 vs South for any of their conference title games.
Deep South: One SEC team in the West conference, four in the East. Yikes.

So…that’s the downside. But I did save a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.

…how are you going to determine conference champions? I think the Pac-10 has it RIGHT in that every team plays every team! I HATE how the SEC and BIG 12 are split into 2 divisions, and sometimes you play a team from the other division and sometimes you don’t – this gives an advantage to the teams that avoid, thru random scheduling, playing the toughest teams in the conference, while making it even harder on other schools who get hit up with a tough schedule.

I say, if you want to do it right, make conferences with divisions NOT play each other during the regular season (or at least make it not count in their division races, just like non-conf games don’t count in conference races) and then face off in a TRUE conference championship game. OR, trim conferences down in size (more like 10, not 12) so that everyone plays everyone in a conference and the winner is determined thru predetermined rules that are fairly applied.

Your proposal is fun, I agree, but it fails (unless I skimmed past that part) to address the end-all argument: How do we finish the season with bowls, playoffs, national championship crowning?

When I dream a little dream like this, I start by asking the ending question, and then working my way back to conferences, rather than starting with conferences and ending up with a gobblygook finish.

Okay, so (re-reading above) you say to forget playoffs and let the writers argue about it.
Hmmm… I guess I never get far in my own machinations of a bowl/playoff/champion solution either.

Lots of work. Pretty maps.

Very impressive post. I like the ordering based on geography. I also hope it would keep recruits in CA.

The bowls are also more representative – giving the NW, SW and Plains region all 1 team in a BCS game. I think that’s impossible under current rules.

It will also go back to establishing whose the nat’l champ by writers/coaches polls. I suppose this could be helped by having the teams that want to compete for a national title actually required to play teams from a different region in their OOC schedule. Texas might have to play LSU or USC. Florida might have to go up to Columbus at some point. I’d be interested in better governed OOC games.

I also think the “patsies” will improve their game by going to a better conference. Schools like SD State are desirable colleges to attend.

Very ambitious proposal. But nah. This re-org actually tends to eviscerate some of the more intriguing and entertaining “rivalries” out there.

Think about it … all we would be left with in our division is Furd. Whoop. And it’s just a net loss for most of the Pac-10. Ferrinstance, we lose Oregon, Washington, and ASU and gain … SJ State? Fresno St? Nevada?

Talk about trading down.

The current conference alignment may not be perfect, and there are a lot of problems, but any restructure should do as much as possible to maintain the existing conference groupings.

Still, I get your point, and nice effort, but nah.

I’m curious as to how you can have a Tex-Mex conference without Rice.

Also, where’s Monterrey A+M Valley State?!?

I go to Tampa a bunch every year. They have U of South Florida there. I always found it odd to call it “South Florida” since you can go many many miles farther South down the Western coast of Florida and hit some pretty sizable cities (like Ft. Meyers). Miami is much farther south on the Eastern coast. Then I thought, maybe they named it South because it’s south of Gainesville (home of Florida). Central Florida (Orlando) is also south of Florida and is practically due East of Tampa. I guess I’m saying I’d like USF to be U of West Florida. Even that would be a little weird because you can go up the panhandle of Florida and be more west than Tampa. Here’s the solution: University of Florida-Tampa not to be confused with the private U. of Tampa. Ai!

except you really thinned out the SEC. I mean I love the closeness of the conference, but 7 of the 12 teams are awful….before you jab me with the ULM jokes, they are still terrible and we’ve moved past those terrible days of darkness in our Program.

I think the new conference names are BA, especially the DSC.

RBR!

By making the “Tex-Mex Divisons” You completely throw out the red river shootout. You also form a an unfair power house “plains division” with 9 former BCS teams

Except you added two NM teams, North Texas, and UTEP, and left off Arkansas.

The Plains conference would definitely be a powerhouse, but they would be without many major cities to draw in big TV money.

McCone Hall baby!

This is kind of how I wish everything was from the beginning – fair and geographically sane. If I wanted to watch all of the Cal games I might not have to even leave my state. Plus every team would have a chance, and reasonable playoffs could result from the format. It’s interesting to imagine which teams would be best in this scenario starting from scratch. Maybe with a legit conference SD st. and UNLV destroy at recruiting 18 year olds to San Diego and Las Vegas, while Fresno St. become like Duke stuck in the middle of the valley.

Sad that it didn’t get set up this way in the first place – then there would be no historic rivalries getting destroyed for people to complain about. Was this post front-paged on SBnation.com?

Soldier Field or Lambeau. Name it something like Ice Bowl.

I too have been toying with ideas about completely realigning conferences, but to me an 8-Conference system with 10 teams in each conference makes more sense. That way, all conferences could play a round robin the way the Pac 10 does, and the 8 conference champions could be the 8 seeds in a playoff. Here are just a few other thoughts:

I don’t think it makes sense to include very many teams from non-BCS conferences unless the teams have proven that they can draw big crowds and compete for a BCS bid. For example, in your Deep South division, there are at least 4 schools that honestly are never going to compete for a conference championship, like UAB, Louisiana-Lafayette, and Louisiana-Monroe. UAB has an attendance record, not average, or 44,000 people even though they play in an 85,000 seat stadium (Legion Field). There are currently 65 teams in a Division 1 BCS Conference. Add Notre Dame to the mix, and the only thing that needs to be done is pluck the top 15 teams from non BCS conferences. The 15 teams could be:
Utah
BYU
Boise St.
Fresno St.
TCU
Hawaii
Tulsa
SMU
Rice
Central Florida
Colorado State
UTEP
East Carolina
Southern Mississippi
Troy State

I don’t really feel like figuring out the conferences right now, you guys get the idea.

First of all, a few things from the South land…What do you do with hated rivals (i.e. Alabama/Tennessee or Auburn/Georgia)? Or what about teams like W. Kentucky or S. Alabama that are joining D1 in the upcoming years?

Also…there was a topic back in December on an Alabama board about a 4 or 8 team playoff, ironically, like RAG, I was already working on something like he had done…here was my post….

This is MY farfetched playoff thought…How about a 10 team playoff? The way I see it you have to win your conference to win the National Championship. First everyone joins a conference and get a conference champion!

The ACC is kept as is along with C-USA and the SEC.

The MAC stays as is minus Temple which goes to the Big East. The Big East also picks up the Independents Notre Dame, Army, Navy.
Big East – (North) Army, Connecticut, Pittsburg, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple (South) Cincinnati, Louisville, Navy, Notre Dame, S. Florida, W. Virgina

The Big Ten picks up Iowa State from the Big XII in return gets TCU from the MWC.

Big Ten - (East) Indiana, Michigan, Michigan St, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue (West) Illiniois, Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Iowa St

Big XII – TCU takes Iowa’s spot in the North Division.

The MWC loses San Diego St to the Pac 10 and gets five teams from the WAC.
MWC - (North) Boise, Idaho, Nevada, Utah St, UNLV, Wyoming (South) Air Force, BYU, Colorado St, New Mexico, Utah, New Mexico St.

The Pac 10 adds Frsno St, San Jose St, and Hawai’i from the WAC along with San Diego State bringing their total to 14 teams.

PAC 10 - (North) Cal, Oregon, Oregon St, Washington, Washington St, Fresno St, San Jose St (South) Arizona, Arizona St, Stanford, USC, UCLA, Hawai’i, and San Diego St

The Sun Belt who picks up W. KY in 2009 adds LA Tech from the WAC to go along with S. Alabama when they come into the league. This conference is one team short of tweleve teams, but leaves an opening for a team looking to make the jump to DI-A (Appl St? just a team that popped into my head).

This omits the WAC, leaving us with 10 conferences.

Now that we have all the Conference Champions here, we can look at a playoff. (say Utah beat Boise St) Seed the teams 1-10 based on the BCS, then by records Buffalo, ECU, and Troy.

ACC – Virigina Tech #7
Big East – Cincinnati #6
Big Ten – Penn State #5
Big XII – Oklahoma #1
SEC – Florida #2
PAC 10 – USC #3
C-USA – ECU #8
MAC – Buffalo#9
MWC- Utah #4
SunBelt – Troy #10

First round on Dec 20th in the New Orleans Bowl (#7 vs #10) for and the EagleBank Bowl (#8 vs #9) for the 7th & 8th Seed.

Second Round Dec 27th starts an eight team playoff with games at the sites of the Fiesta, Sugar, Orange, Rose

Semi Finals will take place Jan 3rd at Netural fields based on two other high paying bowls…Cotton and Chick-fil-a….

Championship Game Jan 10th…

Instead of 10 12-team conferences, why not have 12 10-team conferences? Then each conference can have a full round-robin schedule and room for 3 OOC games.

Hmm, I’m glad to see someone give actual thought to this issue.

Good job Rags!

If we all work together, we can push this reorganization through in time for the ‘09 season! Great work! You’re a genius!

(But we still need a playoff.)

but the whole scheme is a big steaming pile. I don’t have time to go into specifics but in the interest of being positive, I’ll provide a brief description of the preferred embodiment:

Have 12 team super conferences that play a round robin schedule; all CCG games and subdivisions are prohibited. For the PAC 10, add Texas and aTm. Based on a rotation suitable to allow schedule flexibility, the bottom two teams are removed from the conference (football only) and dumped off to the nearest mid-major, replaced by their best two teams. The PAC 12 would have ties to both the MWC and WAC for this purpose. Conference champions have a playoff to determine the national championship. All bowl tie-ins are eliminated but each has an “anchor” team. For the Rose Bowl, the pre-1947 practice of inviting an “at large” contestant to the PAC champion is restored, qualifying teams being any of the other super conference champions. Lastly, all super conference teams are prohibited from scheduling 1aa teams and must balance home and away games, OOC.

That is all. Dismissed.