Tim Benz: College football conferences may have to die for the sport to rediscover why they were important
Share this post:
I’ve long had a theory about how the shifting landscape of college sports conferences would end.
Pretty close to how it started.
I consider the constant conference expansion and contraction to be college football nihilism. The existence of conferences as we know them today is unfounded, senseless and useless. Objective definitions of values, tradition and loyalty to a conference are meaningless.
And once we get through all the conference-hopping by schools and resulting realignment in mega-conferences, we are pretty much going to be back to a college football map like we had in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Essentially, I picture college football being like the construction and eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. A bunch of little conferences coming together into one or two mega-conferences, but then broken up into smaller divisions.
We’re about one or two more controversial Supreme Court rulings from the entire United States of America dissolving into the same type of situation. Maybe we’ll soon be the “not-so-United 50 Colonies” before long.
Frankly, I have an easier time picturing that eventuality than I do a Big Ten that features a conference “rivalry” between Rutgers and USC. Or Maryland and UCLA.
Can’t you see a future where college football breaks off from the old-fashioned conference format and leaves that existence for men’s basketball and all the other sports?
Meanwhile, for football, let’s go big. Really big. We’ll have the “ESPN Conference” made up of whatever the SEC swells into and half of the current Big 12 and ACC. As many as 48 teams, split into four 12-team divisions.
Then there is the “Fox Conference” made up of 48 schools from the supersized Big Ten, the Pac-12 schools and the leftovers from the ACC and the Big 12. It’ll have four 12-team divisions as well.
Hey, if West Virginia and Pitt get absorbed into the Fox Conference with Penn State, they will be division rivals and have to play each other all the time like the old Eastern independent days.
And, somehow, I’m sure Notre Dame will manage to stay independent and worm its way into being championship eligible. How? I don’t know. But I’m sure NBC does. Maybe the Fighting Irish can be a member of both mega-conferences at once.
Related:
• Derek Shelton acknowledges where Pirates failed to get the most out of Clay Holmes
• First Call: Penguins’ level of interest in Marc-Andre Fleury; Matt Murray trade talk, T.J. Watt rated tops at his position
Why not? Right now, the Irish are independent in football, in the Big Ten for men’s hockey and in the ACC for everything else. Would my hypothetical be all that different?
Counting Notre Dame, that plan includes 97 of the 131 FBS programs. The other 34 schools that are left out can make their own mega-conference. Or the Big East can restart football with UConn, Boston College and Syracuse again if they don’t have a chair when the music stops. The MAC can stay the MAC. The Mountain West and Conference USA can still exist in some form, etc.
The mega-conference teams will play 12 games each, 11 against divisional foes and one nonconference game. The winners of each of the four divisions will then play each other over a semifinal weekend, using four Bowl games (perhaps the Sugar Bowl and Orange Bowl for the ESPN league and the Fiesta and Rose in the Fox league). Then a championship weekend to crown the two mega-conference winners (like the AFC and NFC title games in the NFL).
Then the Fox champion can play the ESPN champion for the Major Network College Football title belt.
If those 12-team divisions are made up of traditional, regional rivals, maybe we’ll end up gliding back in time while stumbling forward with the natural evolution of college football.
By “natural evolution,” I mean artificially enhanced and bloated pursuit of the almighty dollar.
Hey, these NIL deals the athletes are making don’t pay for themselves, right?
Sometimes you don’t have to feel good about the process to achieve a positive result. If the death of conferences as we know them brings about the return of more common-sense scheduling and rivalries — not to mention a more streamlined playoff system and traditional use of the Bowl games — wonderful.
Or we can keep pretending that Oklahoma is in the “Southeast” and a 24-team Big “Ten” stretching from New Jersey to Los Angeles makes sense.
As if much of college athletics ever did.