College football needs fixing.
Most college football fans have at least one gripe about how the sport is currently run: “The players deserve to be paid / not paid!” “The BCS was a better/worse way of determining a champion!” “Undefeated teams should be able to declare themselves national champs!” “Why is West Virginia in the Big 12!?”
We at Pitch have a few complaints ourselves, but perhaps our biggest beef is the most popular one: the national champion is not determined by the players on the field. We can host endless debates about which team is the “best” in a given season - indeed, this is much of the fun of spectator sports. But a championship should most concern itself with who is most deserving - meaning what happens on the field.
It is common for the best NCAA basketball team to end their season without lifting the trophy, but nobody can say the champion is undeserving. They won it on the court, and there is no dispute (poor officiating notwithstanding).
THE CURRENT FAIRNESS PROBLEM
Regarding the current playoff system, you can find endless links about how biased the selection committee is. But the truth is there are just too many teams, and they are currently beholden to many structural (read: conference) requirements that make committee selection suboptimal in the first place. Our goal is not even to match up the two “best” teams in a final game (often those games happen in conference title games or semi-finals), but rather to discover the most deserving team overall. For all its flaws, nobody thinks the most deserving team in the country is ever excluded from the March Madness tournament.
And while it’s fun to say “every game matters!” in college football, that’s not the case for most seasons, or most teams.
The Knight Commission released a report stating that college football should be treated differently than other college sports…
Regardless of your views on the commission itself, they do observe something obvious to all college sport spectators: football has almost nothing in common with any other college sport. Revenue is the most obvious separator, but the limited number of games a team can reasonably play, as well the number of scholarships and enormous expense of fielding a competitive team further divide this sport from the rest. The list of differences is long.
In this respect, we here at Pitch agree with the overall suggestion that football should be managed differently than other college sports. But how, exactly, should this be done?
The team at Punch has a plan: the College Football Fix, or CFF for short.
CFF Overview
The CFF has two main components: conference realignment, and competitive relegation. Because football is now separate from the rest of college athletics, we do not have to worry about the impact on existing conference schedules for other sports. Schools are welcome to continue in existing conferences for other sports. This is not uncommon even now; as some schools participate in the Big East for basketball only, for example.
Realignment
All 130 schools currently playing FBS football (plus a handful we’ve promoted from the FCS ranks) will be placed into one of six regional conferences. The CFF permits no independent teams. (Again: just football) Traditional rivalries and history are considered for allocation, as is geography. See the new conference map below.
Each conference has two tiers - you can think of these as “leagues." Each Tier 1 has twelve teams, with two divisions. Tier 2 can have any number of teams, but likely has a floor of eight and a ceiling of eighteen or so. The current Power 5 conference teams have initial allocation preference for Tier 1. The reason for that will be made clear shortly.
Relegation
At the end of every season, all six conferences relegate and promote from within. The last place team from Tier 1 will be relegated to Tier 2, and replaced with the Tier 2 champion.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 each play their own conference championship game, with different stakes. The winners of the six Tier 1 championship games automatically receive one of eight CFF Playoff spots. The Tier 2 conference champions, as we stated before, get to join their respective Tier 1 the following season.
Any given team, no matter the laundry, is only a conference championship season away from competing for the national title.
Conference Realignment
While we’ve considered history and tradition, the six conferences are largely geographically based. One of the benefits of allocating this way is that students and fans are more likely to attend away games via road trip, and road trips and regional rivalries are the lifeblood of keeping college football exciting for generations.
As promotion and relegation takes its toll, teams will begin to play games not part of their traditional conference schedule. If those new teams are reasonably close, fans will be more likely to travel. Somewhat obviously, Florida Atlantic fans will be more likely to travel to a Miami game than a Michigan State game.
You’ll notice we’ve given preference to current Power 5 teams for initial Tier 1 allocation - this is largely to throw those teams a bone, since the teams that are typically in the bottom-half of their conference will be the most at-risk for relegation. If you allocated strictly from recent team performance, these tiers would look somewhat different.
For example, judging by recent performance, the Arizona Wildcats and Vanderbilt Commodores do not belong in Tier 1 right now, and Louisiana and Coastal Carolina almost certainly do. But we want to make this an easier pill to swallow, especially for perennial Power 5 basement dwellers - Kansas, Syracuse and the like. All they have to do is not be last…
Additionally, we’ve included a handful of FCS teams to round out some Tier 2 groups, somewhat arbitrarily. These teams have a “P” next to them on the map above, and their states are delineated clearly. Over time, the Tier 2s could grow to 18 or 20 teams a piece. So long as they can reasonably send two teams to the conference title game, (and leave a couple open dates on each team’s schedule to preserve rivalry games) this is just fine.
how it plays out
Every team plays nine conference games: five from their own division, and four from the other. (Tier 2s with an unusually high number of teams may play more conference games.) Divisions may be redrawn every year as teams move up and down - the important thing is the existence of divisions, not the makeup of them.
The division winners meet in the conference championship game. Non-conference games have no relevance to conference standing - division winners must be determined by conference performance only. A three-way tie within a division must be tie-broken by conference home/away, conference size of victory, and the like. This is easily solved.
Each team has three open dates to book however they like. They are welcome to schedule teams in another conference, in any tier. Even teams in the same conference and tier, but not on the schedule this year. This has two uses: it ensures historic rivalries and “important for TV” games always get played. If Texas gets sent down to Tier 2, or ends up in a different division from Oklahoma, they will still play the Red River Rivalry.
playoffs & bowls
Each of the six conference Tier 1 championship game winners automatically get into the playoffs. There are two “at large” spots - and this is the only place where a committee would still be of use. While a few general metrics can be useful to guide these decisions, a la the current playoff committee’s guidelines, ultimately there are too many teams to have a firm rubric. You could even let all the head coaches vote on who gets in!
(This means the two finalists will play 16 games.)
The first round of the playoffs will feature four games - the classic four New Years Day bowls. The remaining three playoff games will rotate amongst those four, or other desirable sites. The eight teams will be assigned their bowl locations, and their opponents, by lottery.
Note: it is possible that a conference championship game will be replayed in the first, second, or third round of the playoffs, if a Tier 1 conference championship game loser received an at-large playoff spot.
Non-playoff bowls can offer non-champions invitations, or make agreements with conferences that the conference champion game loser receives an automatic invitation, etc. Independent bowls obviously prefer teams that they think will pack the stands, so they may invite a Tier 2 team that is close by and travels well, over a Tier 1 team that isn’t or doesn’t.
Like now, six wins are required for a bowl invitation, although we would personally prefer that bumped to seven wins.
“every game matters”
At the end of the year, the last place team in each Tier 1 is relegated to Tier 2. Teams never move from conference to conference, only tier to tier (that is, unless several new FCS teams in a given region want to move up, and we need to realign all over again). Again - only conference performance is relevant to conference standing.
In a typical year, the last place team in Tier 1 of each conference will be self-evident. But what happens if the last place teams in each division did not play each other, and are tied? In this case, we have a stay-in game: the evening before the conference championship game, the teams play for the right to remain in Tier 1. Since these two will typically not get a bowl invitation, it gives them one more week of practice usually denied to these last place teams.
special rules
A team promoted to Tier 1 cannot be demoted the same year. This gives at least one season of acclimation to the higher level of competition, and prevents teams from ping-ponging back and forth every season. This rule is obviously only necessary in one scenario - if the team is in last place their first year of promotion. In the unique situation described above, in which the first year team is tied for last place, no stay-in game is played. The team with which they are tied is relegated.
You may think this plan is somewhat obvious, and we do too! If you or someone you know wants to be a part of making the CFF a reality, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.