Conference Call
Welcome Back!
There has been much speculation lately about a number of changes and/or problems in college football. I want to take a few paragraphs and address some of these. And if I forget any big issues, please feel free to add a comment, and I will perhaps add that into my next blog.
#1- The transfer portal is causing chaos in CFB. I can understand where this could be a huge concern. You sign a HS kid, develop him for 2 years, and then he leaves to go to another school, and you don't reap any of the benefits. In addition, schools are filling their rosters with transfers, and signing fewer HS kids. First of all, the transfer portal isn't going away, but perhaps it can be regulated to some extent (I'll get into that a little later). Second, this will ease somewhat when all of the Covid-year athletes move on, as some students have been playing for 6 or 7 years, taking up scholarship allotments, and one player, Cam McCormick, will be spending his 9th year on a campus this year! In all fairness, he had several years end early with injuries while at Oregon, and he is now at Miami, in Florida. One solution would be to do away with redshirts altogether, and give every player 5 years to play. This would allow coaches to play athletes as many games as possible, and could cut down on some of the transfers, as freshmen could get into more than just 4 games.
#2- Too many players are opting out of bowl games. With more teams (12) in the playoffs this coming fall (instead of the previous 10 years, which had just 4 teams), fewer players will opt out. Now, that still doesn't affect the rest of the bowl teams, but I have an answer for that below.
#3- NIL is causing chaos, and is essentially pay-for-play. Schools are not supposed to coordinate with collectives. Despite the NCAA investigating FSU and Florida for NIL improprieties, this is basically an area where "everyone is doing it", and no one is really turning in the other programs, because, again, everyone is doing it, in the same way that everyone is looking the other way on tampering. When a kid announces the same day he enters the portal which school he is transferring to, there is absolutely no way that could have not been worked out ahead of time, especially where NIL is concerned. And, to be honest, a coach would be a fool not to coordinate with the collective; you don't want them offering a receiver from, say Texas, if the coach doesn't have a roster spot available or doesn't want that particular player. Again, there's a sensible answer that I'll get into below.
#4- The playoffs are going to run way too long, finishing in mid-January (January 20 for this coming season). This is a valid concern, as these need to be finished sooner. One way to do that would be to start the season one week earlier, which is what is now (stupidly) called Week Zero. This would finish the season the weekend before Thanksgiving, putting the Conference Championship Games the weekend after Thanksgiving. This would put the 1st and 2nd rounds of the playoffs the 1st 2 weekends in December (or 2nd and 3rd, if you wanted to give everyone a week off), with the semifinals as close to January 1 as possible, and the final around the same time as it's been, the 2nd Monday in January. Conversely, if you wanted to give more byes during the season, allowing for more rest for the players, you could reduce the season to 11 games, but most teams don't want to lose that revenue a home game brings.
There's a simple way to fix all this: you have to establish some guidelines that protect and benefit all parties involved- players, programs, and fans. A lot of people have proposed making the athletes employees of the schools (like cafeteria workers, library workers, etc), and that's a possibility, but we don't necessarily need to take that rout. I think we can get stakeholders together to set up a plan that would be a boon to the sport.
Here is what I think needs to happen. Collectives need to be under the purview of the athletic department. Even better is doing away with them altogether. How do we do that? By establishing an organization that runs college football as a sole entity, negotiating a tv contract that includes all 134 teams, rather than the conferences doing it themselves (I'm convinced the networks have staggered the lengths of contracts specifically so this doesn't happen, saving themselves money). College football is the 2nd most popular sport in the US; I'm convinced they can get more from the networks by combining the conferences and negotiating as one. If that happens, guidelines can be established as to how to share revenues with players, and including "contracts" that bind a player to the school they sign with for a specific amount of time. This can happen because the guidelines will be bargained between athletic departments and the athletes (or their representative). This could include exactly how much (and when) the athletes would be paid, stipulations as to their participation in bowl/playoff games, and even length of play- one season, 2 seasons, whatever- that would bind both the player and the athletic department. This would probably mean only one transfer portal, as players would have to "play out their contract" before moving on. This would simplify the transfer portal, get collectives out of the way (everyone basically paid the same), and put a stop to opt-outs. This means players will be choosing a school based on where they want to be (for the location, the coach(es), the academic program, etc) rather than how much they are getting paid, and that would happen because they bargained for it. Athletes can also continue to enter the transfer portal as often as they wish, unless the school does multi-year contracts. It's a risk on both sides, whereas before, all the risks were basically taken by the students, and schools could force them out.
It's not perfect, but it would be whatever a consensus of what the stakeholders (or their negotiators) come up with, and gets Joe Booster once and for all out of the picture.
One other topic that I've been hearing more and more about is the idea of promotion and relegation, such as is done in European Soccer. The question then becomes how many teams in each division, and how many would get to move up/down, and how are these teams divided? There are a number of ways this could be done. Here are a few ideas, but let's call the top division the premier league and the bottom division the champions league (at this point the name isn't important). Also, since conferences are now coast-to-coast, geography has no bearing on who gets chosen.
1) 64 teams in the PL, and 70 teams in the CL. With so many teams, promotion/relegation could affect up to 10 teams in each division. In fact, that could be the bowl games- #1 in the CL plays #64 in the PL, #2 plays #63, etc, with the winners/losers moving up or staying the same. Conversely, the CL could have their own 8 or 12-team playoff (or 16), set up much like the other division, with all participants moving up, and a corresponding number of teams moving down.
2) We could have 4 divisions- the top 3 of 32 teams, and the bottom division of 38 teams. We could have four 8-team playoffs with participants moving up and the bottom 8 of each division moving down, or we could do the crossover games (#1 in Div 2 playing #32 in Div 1, as outlined above, and #1 in Div 3 playing #32 in Div 2, etc.) for the opportunity to move up or stay where you are.
The question then becomes, how do you initially split the teams up? We've already thrown out geography, so there has to be a better way. I would propose it being based on your record over the last 3, 6, or 10 years (or some other number of years). You would probably not want to count games against FCS teams in that winning percentage, but that would have to be decided. For now, let's include those games.
Here is how the teams would be divided if the criteria were based on the winning percentage of the last 3 years- remember, conferences would no longer exist:
64/70 split
Division 1
This division includes teams from the:
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