We all know the arguments for and against a playoff format. BCS proponents talk about retaining the integrity of the bowl system, about how the regular season IS the playoffs, and post season debate about who should be playing in the championship game keeps the sport front page sporting news. The university presidents talk about how the preparation and games in a playoff would hurt the students academics and artificially lengthen their seasons. Playoff proponents talk about how the current system is unjust, and does not reflect any type of true winner, and how the system is designed to be all about conferences gobbling up as much as they can in dollars from the bowl system to create incredible financial gaps between the "haves" and "have nots".
We know all of those, we have heard all SORTS of comprising solutions. But one. And that one is not even MY idea. It comes from, of all sources, the ORIGINATOR of the whole BCS system, and the orchestrator of the SEC's dominance of post-season bowl berths. None other than Roy Kramer.
His idea was that the whole concept of Division I-A football, (NOW stupidly called the Football Bowl Subdivision, (FBS)), had two major flaws.
- It was divisive among the 'top' power conferences causing them to not work together
- It was incredibly TOO large
At first thought you might think, HELL NO! No WAY that would work. So did I....at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I not only liked the idea, (no, I LOVED the idea), and I began to figure out how such a machine might work, keeping in mind such things as traditional rivalries, traditional affiliations, post-season bowl games, regular season integrity and importance, length of regular season, other sports (like basketball and other olympic sports, although by no means does this mean that the schools MUST participate in equally distributed sports offerings, nor even necessarily mean that schools that do not participate in certain sports be forced out or in), and even how the makeup of this conference might change if a school is failing in such areas as minimum attendance figures, academic progress, even probation or NCAA sanctions for impropriety acts by a member institution.
To keep things as brief as possible for this blog entry, I will only deal today with the top-level issue. What that conference makeup might look like, how it might work, and how it is setup and managed. The other issues I will deal with either if there is enough interest, or maybe bring this whole issue back up during the "dog days" of summer.
For now, here is a first pass at how this "Super-80" conference would be structured.
The conference could be setup with 8 regions with 2 divisions per region and 5 schools/teams in each division. This sets up the members for not only a very balanced scheduling pattern, but also a very flexible one, even more so than they have today. And in every way, puts MORE emphasis on the importance of the regular season, than it does on the post season actually. Which you will see in a moment. (Although, I have thought about 10 regions of 8 teams with 2 divisions, that has interesting dynamics also.)
First, how does the scheduling work? With each region being split into 8 regions with 10 teams each, in sports such as football, every school in that region would play each other for a total of 9 "regional" football games, and then 3 "out of region" football dates to schedule. In each region, and at the end of the regular season, the two top teams in each "division" of each "region" would play in "regional" championship game, (not a bowl game, but like the conference championship games today that the ACC, SEC and B-12 have), to determine the 8 "regional" champions. Those 8 "regional" champions then would play in 4 major bowl games, (in this case, the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and Orange) bowls; keeping in mind the "integrity" of the bowl games and their traditions. (For example, in the new makeup, two of the new "regions" could be made up almost entirely of the existing members from both the PAC-10 and the Big-10 and those two regional winners would ALWAYS play in the Rose bowl.)
Now, here is the interesting part. We literally COULD end things right there and actually go BACK to the old pre-BCS way of determining the national champions. That being by using the AP and/or Coach's poll for the champion. What is interesting about that, is that the ONLY controversy then would be who of the top 4 is the #1 team in the nation. And if at some point down the road, this "Super 80 conference" decided it WANTED to play two more games to determine the national champion in football, it could do so. A two game playoff, is FAR more easy to put in place and attain "buy in" than any other type of compromise situation.
But what about the money distribution and the other post-season bowl games? What about all of those other bowl games out there, who plays in those? You could STILL have those! BUT, ALL of the money from every bowl game that the Super-80 conference plays in, all gets pooled into a pot and distributed to all members in the conference, with bonus to those teams that are top 16, top 8 and top 4 at the end of the bowl post-season. (again, this is too long to discuss in this one blog, so we can do that some other time.)
But what about the other "money" sports like basketball? Ah, even MORE cool, IMHO than football. With 10 teams in each region, basketball would play a true "round-robin" 18 game regional schedule, and then follow a post-season playoff format to determine the Super-80 conference champion. (Guess what? This just might end up being bigger than the NCAA tournament, even though you could STILL play that. And the money would stay in the conference.) But again, another discussion too long for this single blog entry.
So, what would this Super-80 conference look like? What schools would make up that conference? As I noted, some of the schools might be in flux, but here is my take on one possible makeup of schools, while trying to retain as MANY of the "traditional" rivalries and geographical interest as possible. (you may have to scroll down quite a bit to see the table, because this blog forum does not handle html table tags very well. My apologies.)
| Region One | Region Two | Region Three | Region Four |
| A Division | A Division | A Division | A Division |
| Syracuse | Memphis | UNC | Miami |
| Boston College | Louisville | Duke | South Florida |
| Notre Dame | Tennessee | Wake Forest | Central Florida |
| Navy | Kentucky | East Carolina | FSU |
| Rutgers | Vanderbilt | NC State | Florida |
| B Division | B Division | B Division | B Division |
| Virgina Tech | West Virginia | Clemson | Auburn |
| Maryland | Marshall | S. Carolina | Alabama |
| Army | Cincinnati | Georgia Tech | Ole Miss |
| Virginia | Penn State | Georgia | Miss State |
| UConn | Pittsburgh | MTSU/WKU | Southern Miss |
| Next four regions | |||
| Region Five | Region Six | Region Seven | Region Eight |
| A Division | A Division | A Division | A Division |
| Indiana | Iowa | Texas | Washington |
| Purdue | Iowa St. | Texas Tech | Washington St. |
| Ohio State | Kansas | Texas A&M | Oregon |
| Michigan | Kansas St. | TCU | Oregon St. |
| Michigan St. | Nebraska | Houston | Stanford |
| B Division | B Division | B Division | B Division |
| Illinois | Oklahoma | Colorado | Southern Cal |
| Northwestern | Oklahoma St. | Colorado St. | UCLA |
| Wisconsin | Arkansas | BYU | Arizona |
| Minnesota | LSU | Utah | Arizona St. |
| Missouri | Tulane | Air Force | California |
Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the discussion. And I only wanted to put this out there for posterity and comment. There are MANY questions and considerations about such a proposal, and believe me, since I first heard about this over 10 years ago, I have thought of a lot of them, and thought through them. As this blog goes forward, I will try to come back to this topic, if there is interest, and address those. For now, that's the idea.
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