College Football Conference Realignment

Updated Nov 28, 2012 (Louisville to ACC, New 4 Conf Scenario)

I have long been more interested in NCAA sports conference realignment than with NCAA sports, though when younger I followed hoops and some college football. With the B1G 10 admitting Maryland and Rutgers, this stuff just got personal. I grew up a Maryland fan, and as such, an Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) superioritarian. That is, if the Terps did not win the Conference, it was just because the ACC competition was superior. This of course really only applied in basketball. I taste the bitterness of Maryland with Albert King and Buck Williams facing off against Ralph Sampson, Jr. (not III) of Virginia, or Duke.

Now Maryland has been raptured into the B1G 10 Conference, so as a Minnesotan I might actually see them more often, but it is wrong somehow.

It is not especially wrong from a geographic perspective. The distance from Nebraska to Rutgers is 1292 miles. The driving distance from Boston to Miami is 1505 miles, so the ACC is not more compact than the Big 10, though this move makes the Big 10 less compact, and increases the moment of inertia of the ACC. But the issue is more than miles, it is also time zones. Until the Notre Dame addition, all members of the ACC were in states that were entirely Eastern Time Zone. The Big 10 was split between Eastern and Central time zones. With the late addition of Nebraska, they now contain a state in the Mountain Time Zone. Of course from television product, and start times, having a multiple timezone spanning conference could be profitable, since it staggers the games.

It is wrong from an historical perspective. The Big 10 was the Western Conference (in contrast with the Ivy League's Eastern Conference). But now it is East (in terms of Rutgers) from several Ivies (Penn, Princeton, Cornell).

As has been widely noted, it is wrong mathematically (the Big 10 has 14 members, the Big 12 has 10 members).

It is wrong from a tradition-preservation perspective. Even if the Maryland-Virginia football game is not as bitter-fought as the Georgia-Georgia Tech game, the Terps against Duke in basketball was notable. While realignment is not new (Where is the University of Chicago now? Just a husk of its former self now that it no longer competes in the Big 10, an unimportant school of little import.), it ought not be encouraged if you want to preserve my youth and allow me to relive it for a few weekends every Fall.

Everyone says televised football is the driver here, and no one cares about televised college basketball, but I don't think that's true, not in the northeast, where college football sucks and college basketball does not.

Most importantly it is wrong, or at best short-sighted, from a long-term economic perspective.

Everyone seems to believe that the current model of Cable TV channels paying big bucks to conferences, which depends on the current model of Cable TV surviving, will sustain. What happens with Internet Television, a la carte programming, etc. Will ESPN (as a live programming "channel") even be around in 15 years? This feels a lot like when the Dodgers and Giants left New York to go to California for Pay Television, among other reasons, in the 1950s (Pay Television wasn't viable until the late 1970s). Having a "channel" in a "market" makes little sense in a world where anyone can watch anything live (for a fee or for commercials).

Who should be concerned about whether the Big 10 Network will be carried in a particular state or metro area? Anyone will access the programs from anywhere. There needs to be some gatekeeper for funding the coverage, but that can be done without TV networks, and that will change the economics enormously, which makes worrying about these networks at best transient.

There is no stability here. This is what "Gales of Creative Destruction" are all about.

The most stability you could achieve is if the teams in a conference are all roughly equal, so no one is free-riding off the others, and no one is feeling like they are supporting the others. But that assumes that a club of 9, 10, 12, 14, or 16 schools can somehow maintain that level of no cross-subsidies for an extended period. The number of colleges may be roughly fixed (and this of course assumes colleges and universities are stable in a decade or two, and that is doubtful too), the number of permutations and combinations of those colleges is enormous.

Carriage of the Big 10 Television Network (BTN) on the right tier of local cable systems, which is supposedly the source of the push behind the eastward thrust of the Big 10 will soon seem as irrelevant as Betamax vs VHS. Carriage is not going to be a scarce commodity in 10 years, much less the 20 or 40 years conferences should care about (since that is the timeframe when Alumni of my age might think about donating to their alma mater, and tradition breaking does not make one fonder).

Not only is television changing, it is highly likely sports will change. Football is not likely to be with us in its current format in a few decades.

Nothing is permanent, everything changes. The past is gone. Get over it.

I previously fixed the college football playoff system. I still believe this is close to the end state once college football moves from a 4 team to an 8 team playoff (though apparently the Sugar Bowl will get dibs instead of the Orange Bowl for the Semi-Finals). This is why there 6 bowls in the current arrangement, 4 for quarter-finals, 2 for semi-finals, and then 1 for the finals, which will be new.

Below are my schemas for what used to be called Division I conferences (and now FBS) assuming irreversibility (Humpty Dumpty will not be reassembled) and the crack-up of the Big East (the BB schools expel the remaining football schools and build a new elite BB conference) and the WAC. (With all thanks to Matt Peloquin and his website for background.) That is, this is the best that can be done assuming 5 major conferences. If we go to 4, see below, assuming we pass through the 5 conference scenario first. While these are not the conferences I want, I think this maximizes stability going forward, across the dimensions of historical stability, geographic sanity, and approximate similarity in quality of football play.

Comments on the 5 conference scenario. This is roughly where we are, with UCONN Louisville going to the ACC, the Big 12 going to 14 with Cincinnati, Air Force, Boise State, and BYU (perhaps football only), and the Pac 12 adding Hawaii and UNLV, the next best Western state schools. I know the Pac 12 would consider raiding the Big XII (for OK, TX, TT, OSU, or Kansas), but I think that is not worth doing in the end, for all the reasons it failed last time. I also assume CUSA and the Mountain West have a friendly realignment, perhaps going to a 2 game playoff sequence. The MAC gets overly large picking up the rest of the Big East football teams and the academies.

Comments on the 4 conference scenario. This is roughly 16x4+2 that would make nice symmetry. Here the ACC cracks up. (The alternative is the Big XII cracks, but given current money flows, it looks like the ACC will break first). I just think there are at least 66 schools in the system that will need to be in the majors for a playoff system. One could promote some of the other MINORS schools (maybe from the ACC or Big East), but none of them are strong enough to force their way in for football (the best are Syracuse, Pitt, or Connecticut, but they are weaker than the weakest team in the MAJORS except for Vanderbilt, Baylor, or Northwestern, which all already in). The Big 10 goes for east coast markets with TV carriage and for elite land grant schools (NC, UVA, GT). The Big 12 goes for second schools in SEC states, + Notre Dame. The Pac-16 bites the bullet and admits Boise State and BYU. The SEC picks up the rest of the ACC football schools (second tier state land grants, NC State and Virginia Tech) in states they don't already have schools.

The champions of the 4 conferences, plus 4 top-ranked wild cards will be in the playoffs. Big 10 will align with Fox, Big 12 with NBC, SEC with CBS, and PAC 12 with ABC/ESPN for a few years before football is abolished and the networks disemboweled.

5 Conference Scenario

4 Conference Scenario: Big XII Survives, ACC Destroyed

4 Conference Scenario ACC Survives, Big 12 demolished