An idea that would fix college football

For a short, general idea of how things would work see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_and_relegation" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



It would have to be modified a bit for sure. Not sure if yearly promotions and relegations would be appropriate when there is a 3-5 year complete player turnover in CFB. Have to decide on whether to/how to keep things regionsal, protect rivalries etc. But I think it is a solution that could keep the big schools happy while allowing the little guys the chance.



For example: 64 teams in top division, 64 beneath them and so on, including FCS schools.



Now, I'm not saying that this solution is perfect and without flaws, but I think it would provide a stable, fair, long term solution which NO bowl or conference system up to this point has yet been able to provide.



With rumors of CFB Armageddon rampant, NCAA decertification, mid-majors being permanently locked out etc., I see this as an excellent solution that fits the needs of both the major players right down to the FCS schools.



Thoughts?

They do this now in Hawaii. I'm not a big fan because a team in the lower division goes undefeated (senior laden) and gets promoted up and then doesn't win a game the next year resulting in a demotion again. I think they have finally decided to cool it a little on the promotion and relegation to have more consistency. Like college football there are a few teams that are always good and then some teams at the bottom (as one friend once told me teams that can not do two things at once: like play football and be good at the same time).

Agreed. I would love to see promotion/relegation in American sports but it can't work for the NCAA due to the mandatory turnover (graduation/eligibility). Now if we were talking NBA/NFL on the other hand ...

Relegation/Promotion would never fly in American sports. Can you imagine someone telling the owner of the St. Louis Rams that their team is being relegated and can no longer receive a share of the NFL's tv deals? They'd be like, sorry, I spent $500 million to own this team in the NFL, not the NFL2 or other lower division.

No, relegation would never work in NFL etc. where profit sharing runs the league. But NCAA football isn't like the NFL. And I agree, there is a great deal of turnover in college, which is why you wouldn't have to relegate/promote every year.

How would it work in college sports? Athletes are only there for four or five years, and they often only play a year or two. You be promoting a school based on last years team, and half of the starters graduated.



Think about Ball State in 2008 when they went 12-2 under Brady Hoke. They would have been promoted, but the next year they went 2-10.

Then Ball St would have been relegated again. European soccer faces the same issues when teams compete in next year's Champions League, based on this year's results, and some teams lose players who led them to this year's success.

The problem is, if you're not relegating every year that means every couple of years you get teams like Auburn which are just downright terrible, and they get to be terrible in the upper division for a few years based on their past history and get the recruiting benefits of that, while a team like say a Houston could be great but stuck in the lower division for a few years and get all the recruiting draw backs of that, then lets say 2 or 3 years later (or 5 or 6) the two teams flip, now all the jrs and seniors that made Houston great have graduated and because they've been in a lower division couldn't get equal recruits, so they suck, and Auburn which has enjoyed unwarranted success in recruiting is now too good to be in the lower division.



Seems like a bit of a mess.

hawkwing wrote:
The problem is, if you're not relegating every year that means every couple of years you get teams like Auburn which are just downright terrible, and they get to be terrible in the upper division for a few years based on their past history and get the recruiting benefits of that, while a team like say a Houston could be great but stuck in the lower division for a few years and get all the recruiting draw backs of that, then lets say 2 or 3 years later (or 5 or 6) the two teams flip, now all the jrs and seniors that made Houston great have graduated and because they've been in a lower division couldn't get equal recruits, so they suck, and Auburn which has enjoyed unwarranted success in recruiting is now too good to be in the lower division.



Seems like a bit of a mess.

This is exactly the problem. College teams have massive turnover every year of their most experienced players, and an influx of new, inexperienced players that could be better - or not. Relegation absolutely cripples recruiting, scheduling, and profitability, and is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy.



On the other hand, it might make sense to have something like this for post-season play. What I mean is, the number and quality of bowl tie-ins your conference is allowed is predicated on the number of actual bowl eligible teams and their success in those bowl games. Or, in a playoff situation, it determines your champion's seeding.



That actually might create an arms race among conferences to jettison bad teams and pick up good teams, which kind of makes relegation happen as a side effect. But if you did it outright, you're basically doing an SMU death penalty in slow motion.

I really like promotion-relegation in theory, and I agree that it would solve *a lot* of the problems in college athletics. However,it would require the NCAA to run the entire show. It would tell teams when to go up or down, it would assign teams to conferences, it would probably end up having a lot of control over scheduling (IMO, scheduling unfairness is a bigger problem in CFB than the BCS). And that would never happen: remember, the NCAA is a federation, not a corporation like the NFL or a government regulatory agency. It is owned by its member universities, and the people with the real power (university presidents, conferences, bowls, boosters) have no interest in doing what is best for CFB as a whole (i.e., relinquishing power to the NCAA). And why should they?



BTW, I came up with a promotion-relegation system one day in a fit of BCS rage. All of Div I-A is divided into strictly regional 8-team conferences. After the first seven games, they are divided into an upper half and lower half, then play 4 games against the matching half of the neighboring conference. Then winners move on to a 16-team playoff, while everyone else plays an additional "bowl" game against a distant team. It was perfectly fair and perfectly rational, just like communism ;)

I am resurrecting this thread because of all the upheaval in college football recently and the dooms day scenarios being discussed about a new tier in college football.



As you can see from this thread I was a detractor of the idea initially, but since then I have learned more about how relegation works in the English Premier League, and because of some of the changes I have seen in college football recently.



The first thing that has changed that makes a relegation system now possible is that we are seeing more and more schools be football only members of conferences. BYU and Notre Dame are football independents with their other sports in leagues. And when the Big East expanded, three of the teams it added were football only, leaving Navy, Boise State and San Diego State to find another home for their other sports. It used to be that "football drives the bus" but more and more we are seeing football get off the bus and take their own car. A big concern about relegation is how it would affect the other sports, but with football and the other sports becoming increasingly decoupled, I say you finish the job and disconnect them entirely. We have football conferences and then we have conferences for every other sport.



Another typical argument against relegation is the financial impact on schools facing relegation. I learned this spring that in the English Premier League (EPL) that relegated clubs basically get a gradually decreasing stipend to ease the transition. Of course one of the, if not the biggest expense for college football programs is coaching since players aren't paid. I am guessing that relegated schools would probably sack their coaches anyway, so that shouldn't be a big problem, but you could still have the decreasing stipend to help wean the school off higher football budgets.



Another argument is that you are rewarding a school on past performance and a senior laiden team could gain promotion only to face demotion the next year. This is true, but I think the bigger issue is rewarding programs and not teams. The system as it is set up, or with the Super 64 setup there is no carrot for programs stuck at the lower level and no stick for under performing schools at the higher level. Promotion and relegation fixes that. Also my example from above, with Ball State, isn't really the biggest issue. Ball state had a great year, but few people are arguing that they deserved to play in the championship, but it is schools like Boise State who have been locked out despite a decade of tremendous success. Ball State would have been promoted and demoted the next year, but Boise State would have been promoted and stayed promoted and could be playing in a college football playoff for the title. I know officially it is a 4 team playoff, but when you include the conference divisions and championship games it really is an 8 team playoff. All of the 64 would have a legitimate shot any year and could not complain for not getting a chance. And on the flip side, the perennial underachieving schools would get relegated to make room for schools on the rise.



Discuss.

I'd be fascinated in promotion/relegation in college football. One of the problems is to determine who to promote and relegate. In England, each team plays each other team in the league twice--it's a completely balanced schedule, so it's pretty clear who deserves promotion/relegation.



In NCAA football, this might have to be done at a regional level: basically, the 128 teams comprising the top two divisions are divided into 4 32-team conferences, with the top 16 in each conference being in the top flight, and the second 16 being in the second division. Promotion/relegation only happen within the conference.



I would set it up so the top team in the conference's second division is promoted and the 2nd and 3rd place team have a winner takes all game for the second promotion slot. The 16th team in the upper division is relegated and the 15th and 14th teams have a loser takes all game to for the second relegation slot.



The problem with such a system is that it wouldn't correct for regional discrepancies in quality of play. Consistently bad teams would remain up if they played in a weak conference.

I think it might work better than you think. But this would require an awful lot of revenue sharing and an actual governing body (NCAA) that works and has control over such things.

SpiffCoug wrote:
European soccer faces the same issues...

Eww, reason enough to lock this thread down and throw this idea away.

Mingjai wrote:
I'd be fascinated in promotion/relegation in college football. One of the problems is to determine who to promote and relegate. In England, each team plays each other team in the league twice--it's a completely balanced schedule, so it's pretty clear who deserves promotion/relegation.



In NCAA football, this might have to be done at a regional level: basically, the 128 teams comprising the top two divisions are divided into 4 32-team conferences, with the top 16 in each conference being in the top flight, and the second 16 being in the second division. Promotion/relegation only happen within the conference.



I would set it up so the top team in the conference's second division is promoted and the 2nd and 3rd place team have a winner takes all game for the second promotion slot. The 16th team in the upper division is relegated and the 15th and 14th teams have a loser takes all game to for the second relegation slot.



The problem with such a system is that it wouldn't correct for regional discrepancies in quality of play. Consistently bad teams would remain up if they played in a weak conference.

I see what you are saying about who to relegate and how your proposal has ignores regional discrepancies.



One possible solution would be to relegate the 16th team from each conference but have the 15th place teams from the conferences square off against another, rotating the conference pairings each year. Then do the same for promotions. The top from each conference automatically gets promoted, but the 2nd place teams square off for the promotion.



This takes care of regional variations because if the Southeast is strong then they will only relegate one team each year, while promoting one or possibly two each year. If the North is weak then they will relegate 2 teams each year while promoting one or perhaps none. The conference foot print would slowly stretch in the direction of strength. It may require occasionally moving a team that was neither promoted nor relegated but that would be fairly rare, and besides rivalries have been tossed by the way side anyway so who cares.

Isola wrote:
One possible solution would be to relegate the 16th team from each conference but have the 15th place teams from the conferences square off against another, rotating the conference pairings each year. Then do the same for promotions. The top from each conference automatically gets promoted, but the 2nd place teams square off for the promotion.



This takes care of regional variations because if the Southeast is strong then they will only relegate one team each year, while promoting one or possibly two each year. If the North is weak then they will relegate 2 teams each year while promoting one or perhaps none. The conference foot print would slowly stretch in the direction of strength. It may require occasionally moving a team that was neither promoted nor relegated but that would be fairly rare, and besides rivalries have been tossed by the way side anyway so who cares.

Yeah, I had thought of something similar to this as well, but I was afraid of realignments until I realized that this promotion/relegation system would require a strong governing organization. I'd imagine the governing body would be able to dictate conference realignments as well.



Here's my other system allowing realignments:



Same setup of 128 teams, 2 divisions, 4 conferences in each division. 16th team in each conference automatically relegated. In addition 4 playoff games featuring the 14th team of one conference versus the 15th of another, with the losers going down. Matchups determined by draw and either neutral field or 14th-place teams hosting.



Promotion mirrors relegation: 1st in each conference automatically promoted. 4 playoff games featuring the 2nd of one conference against the 3rd of another, with the winners going up. Matchups determined by draw and with either neutral field or 2nd-place teams hosting.



Following promotion/relegation, the governing body realigns teams as necessary to fill conferences using some transparent criteria (minimize gerrymandering).