Gheorghe Realigns: A Modest and Pointless Proposal

It's been a seismic several years in major intercollegiate sports (almost literally - the tectonic plates have shifted to conspire to bring UCLA and USC adjacent to Rutgers and Maryland in sport scheduling terms). And the noise continues unabated, the Big Ten and SEC extending their inexorable manifest destiny and creating chaos in their wake, the other major (for now) conferences scrambling to pretend to compete. 

Will Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona state join the Big 12 to make the best hoops league even better and create false hope for football glory (probably)? Will the addition of SMU and San Diego State make the PAC-12 a viable commercial entity and stop the conference's bleeding (nope)? What can the ACC do to stay relevant (if you have the answer, they'd love to hear from you, stuck as they are in a rights deal with ESPN that handcuffs the league until 2036)?

As usual, we have the answer, but not the solution. Let's start by acknowledging that moneyed interests will never allow the people to prevail. But still we beat on, a dinghy against the current, borne forward ceaselessly by our own flawless logic and well-turned phrasing. We'll offer ideas for consideration, fully aware that mismatched incentives and entrenched interests will render them dead on arrival. Still, one's intellectual fires must be slaked.

These aren't necessarily original ideas. Common sense is often just that - common, shared by many. Some of these notions aren't even new - we've already trod the road less traveled in this very pixelspace as it relates to some form of conference realignment (do enjoy the commentary of the Gheorghies in that thread - we invent the Guido League and the Papist Conference). It seems obvious, though, that something must give. 

What should give, says this humble blogger, is everything. The NCAA as we know it should go away, replaced by the following three-headed organizational construct (let's state for the record that we're only talking about what we currently know as Division I athletics - the NCAA remains a useful model for DII and DIII competition):

The Collegiate Football Federation (CFF) would run major college gridiron activities, in collaboration with the networks. Effectively, this would be everything that fits within the current Power Five conference structure, with a few puts and takes to include schools that want to participate (and are willing to pony up the necessary funding) like Notre Dame, Cincinnati, BYU, etc. Let's say we wind up with 80 teams in a mega-conference with eight regional divisions to make it easy to get to a 16-team championship tournament by taking the top two teams in each division.

Non-Power Five schools and those that currently fit that description that might choose to deemphasize a money-loser like also-ran big-time football would participate in a new FCS-like entity (Hello, Vanderbilt! Nice to see you, Kansas football! 'Sup Boston College!) that would feature robust competition but less financial commitment than would be required in the CFF. This division would have 174 teams, which we'd spread out regionally into 16 leagues - once again allowing for ease of championship management. We might see some current FCS teams drop into DII or DIII, which is fine - the point of this entire exercise is to get colleges of the arms race treadmill to nowhere that's inevitably going to reward the rich and bankrupt the poor and return to a more balanced and rational experience for students that happen to be athletes. 

In this world, we would eventually see a William & Mary in the same league as Old Dominion, James Madison, Towson, Richmond, and Navy, among others - a sane return to a compact league. You could play the same game with Rice, who'd play SMU, North Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas State, Tulane and so on rather than traveling to Annapolis, Philadelphia, Boca Raton, and Harrisonburg to play roadies.

Hoops is a little bit of a simpler animal. We're just going to lift and shift the current Division One teams  into a new organizing body, empowered to continue to run the NCAA tournament while also creating a more rational divisional structure that maximizes competition and optimizes travel. Same 351 teams, both men and women. Same tournament setups. To a large extent, the same conferences (though UCLA and USC have to go back to the PAC-12 for hoops).

Every other sport (at a school like Texas, for example, that's 16 programs once you remove football and men's and women's basketball) is organized in the Olympic Sports Governance Council (OSGC - just go with it, man, I don't make up the names, just report them). We've already mooted a version of this, as seen in the link above. It makes absolutely zero sense for UCLA to send its tennis team to New Brunswick, NJ to play a conference match against Rutgers, and vice versa. Maryland's field hockey team, as good as it is, shouldn't need to incur the costs of traveling to Lincoln, NE for a league match when they can get great league competition in D.C., Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, Happy Valley, Philly, and Princeton. (Stanford competes in the America East in women's lacrosse. Stanford! The America East! They played away matches against Albany, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and UMASS - Lowell this season! Fucking bonkers, y'all)

No, the sports generally considered "non-revenue" in the accounting-driven parlance of the current NCAA will find a much more rational structure that emphasizes regional play, student welfare, and cost reduction, re-emphasizes local/regional rivalries, and still allows for national competition for the teams and schools that thrive in their leagues.

This is a hurriedly dashed-off musing about what a new system of intercollegiate athletics might look like. There are certainly flaws with the plan (the most glaring of which is the idea that any current athletics administrator or university president would willingly choose to move their football program "down" to an "inferior" division), and I harbor no illusion that it'll come to fruition. That said, I would not be surprised if the networks and major conferences break from the NCAA, at least as it comes to football, and in that scenario, those on the outside looking in would be well served to find a new model.

Winter's coming. At least if you're a middling ACC football program. Better put on your coat.