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May 27, 2011

A College Football Premier League?

Where would a school like ECU land?
Two days ago, Tony Barnhart of CBSSports.com wrote an article about a premier-league-type divide in college football. He allows some conspiratorial-like speculation to consider if there are ulterior reasons behind all the new, booming television deals and research into providing athletes with full-cost scholarships.

What would this new league look like?

Here is Barnhart's set up: Getting tired of threats from attorney generals and departments of justice, and with each BCS conference except the Big East in possession of at least 10-year TV deals, the big boys break and create their own association -- the College Football Association.

The key with this association is that, unlike its defunct namesake that was nixed by the Supreme Court over an antitrust issue, the conferences themselves will have already negotiated television deals on their own, instead of through the CFA which was the (illegal) plan in 1984. So what would the CFA look like?

Barnett speculates that after the Big East expands to 12 teams, they would join the other 5 BCS conferences along with Army, BYU, Navy, and Notre Dame (2 of which have their own TV deals as well) to form the CFA.

Boise State ... left out in the cold.
NCAA Division I-A would be comprised of Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt, and WAC, and would be joined by the best of the current FCS: Big Sky, CAA, Missouri Valley, and Southern Conferences. The lower divisions would go through similar changes/shifts.

On one hand, this could spell the end of the BCS, and both the CFA and Division I-A might institute playoffs to determine champions. It could also force big schools to play other big schools more often, having less to lose by playing strong non-conference opponents. On the other, it would result in schools like Boise State and their MWC cohorts getting frozen out of lots of revenue for their schools.

We want your opinion on this: what would be the ramifications of such a drastic shift? Would this improve competition? Or would it ruin college football?  (And is your opinion based solely on where your team lands?)

Is this crazy? Or revolutionary?
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2 comments:

  1. The only way I can see this working is if the CFA and D-1 teams are still able to play each other. There is no way that you'd be able to get away without scheduling home-home series against fellow CFA teams, and there's no way that certain teams in certain conferneces (Florida, SEC in general) would give up playing as many weak opponents as they do now, partly because they are cowards and partly because they can have more home games and more money that way.

    Also, I think schools like BYU, Boise State, Utah and TCU have shown that there is some room for mobility. And certain schools like WSU, Vanderbilt, Iowa State, are only BCS teams because of historical alignments, not because they regularly compete at that high of a level.

    Some people would use those points to suggest that we move to a relegation model where high performing teams are moved up and low performing teams moved down (ala Soccer in Europe) however that ignores the myriad other factors (travel, scheduling, non-football sports, academic groupings) that would get in the way of such fluid conference arrangments.

    I think that a split from the NCAA is unlikely at this point and that the asinine and incompetent rules enforcement is a bigger problem then potential playoff preassure.

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  2. Good thoughts as usual, Krizoitz. Regarding non-football sports, I'm pretty sure this would just be a football thing ... other sports would be business as usual. Just my assumption, though.

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