This week's departure of UCLA and USC from the conference and rivalries to which they've been tied for almost a century proves that tradition no longer matters in college football. With that in mind, I've come up with a simple (actually complicated) solution that will solve six problems all at once.
What if I told you that I've fixed the playoff system, reduced excessive travel, restored competitive balance, eliminated nonsensical non-conference scheduling, injected competition into the lower levels of the sport, and revived the bowl system all at once? Would you be interested in such a system? I think you would be. Read on.
The first thing you need to know is that what I propose will never happen, in the same way that we will never have flying cars or time machines or teleportation devices, so I'll ask you right now for some suspension of disbelief. For just a minute, I want you to imagine that what I'm describing is possible. I want you to imagine a better world. I want you to imagine what college football would be like under a new system, the MWS -- the Magic Wand System.
Step one is for all schools to remove their football teams from the clutches of the NCAA. The conferences we once knew that have merged and twisted and split like amoebas beneath a microscope are no longer. Instead, the 130 schools are divided into four regions -- Pacific, Midwest, South, and Atlantic. Each of those regions are then sorted into three divisions, Gold, Silver, and Bronze, according to performance. To give you a visual, I used Bill Connely's final S&P+ rankings from the 2021 season. (There are other ranking systems I could've used, but this seems as good as any.)
I did my best to sort the teams geographically, but that wasn't the easiest task, and some rivalries have disappeared. Texas won't play Oklahoma and USC won't play Notre Dame, for example, but remember -- tradition doesn't matter anymore.
So given all of that, here's how things would break down, including the 2021 S&P+ rankings of each team.
Already this is looking pretty good, but it gets so much better. First there's the scheduling. For the twelve-team Gold and Silver divisions, all of the schools will play each other producing an eleven-game schedule devoid of cupcakes. In the Bronze divisions with only eight or nine teams, teams will play everyone else in their region, but the Atlantic and Pacific region teams will first open with three geographically feasible cross-regional games, while the Midwest and South will open with two such matchups, giving a total of ten regular season games for Bronze teams.
After all of that, we'll have the best postseason the sport has ever seen. In the Gold Division, the top four teams in each region will qualify for the championship playoffs, and the teams will be reseeded 1-16. For our purposes, let's pretend the 2021 teams finished the regular season according to the rankings above. Here's what the playoff bracket would look like, with the first two rounds of games being played on the campus of the higher seeded teams:
You'll notice that there are some competitive balance issues, and teams in the Midwest and South will be furious that teams like Oregon and Fresno State from the Pacific and Coastal Carolina and Miami from the Atlantic advanced to the playoffs ahead of them, but it's good for them to have something to complain about. After all, we need to hang to at least a few traditions.
The playoff system is nice, and much better than what we have today, but the best part of the MWS is that we're adding a promotion and relegation mechanism modeled after European soccer to keep fans interested when their teams have fallen short of the playoffs. Three Gold and Silver teams will be relegated each year, and three Silver and Bronze teams will promote. To see how this will work, let's look closely at the Pacific Region, top to bottom.
Gold Division:
Playoffs: Utah, Arizona State, Fresno State, and Oregon.
Gold Bowl Teams (see below): Texas Tech, UCLA, Boise State, and Oregon State.
Relegation Playoff: BYU vs. Texas. Winner remains Gold, loser relegated to Silver.
Automatically relegated: San Diego State and Air Force.
Silver Division:
Automatically promoted: Washington State and UT-San Antonio.
Promotion Playoff: Nevada vs. Cal. Winner promotes to Gold, loser remains Silver.
Silver Bowl Teams: Wyoming, Utah State, USC, and Washington.
Relegation Playoff: San José State vs. Hawai'i. Winner remains Silver, loser relegated to Bronze.
Automatically relegated: Colorado State and UTEP.
Bronze Division:
Automatically Promoted: Colorado and Stanford.
Promotion Playoff: Arizona vs. UNLV. Winner promotes to Silver, loser remains Bronze.
No bowl games.
December would be filled with the deepest playoff field we've ever seen, sixteen promotion and relegation games, and sixteen bowl games. We're honoring tradition by creating those sixteen bowl games. An independent committee would draft the teams into cross regional matchups at each level, eight Gold level bowl games and eight silver. Under this system, 112 of the 130 teams would play at least one postseason game, and 31 of those 47 postseason games would be high stakes matchups determining either the national championship or future division placement. The vast majority of teams would have something to play for deep into the season, and fans everywhere would be engaged as never before. The well-being of student-athletes would be prioritized, but the money would still flow.
It would be beautiful. If only I had a magic wand.
