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I saw someone link to Meditations on Moloch in the college football subreddit a couple of days ago, to explain why conference realignment is happening and get a lot of upvotes. Was shocked to see Scott referenced in a normie subreddit like that
On a related note, I have a feeling that unless drastic action is taken the entire college football edifice is going to collapse some time in the next decade. NIL deals combined with the transfer portal have turned the entire enterprise into the worst sort of professional sports league. How would the NFL look if there were no salary cap and no contracts, making every player a free agent every year? Since NIL is here to stay, and I don't see the transfer portal going away any time soon, if I were an NIL sponsor I'd make my deal contingent on the player staying at the school all four years, unless I grant him a release. I don't care if it's for the fucking NFL; if I'm committing money to a guy I want to get the max value out of him. I'd also include some kind of liquidated damages clause or prepay the entire 4 (or 5) years so that if he leaves he has to pay the money back. I might not be able to collect all of it depending what the court does, but he'll have to pay something, and he knows he's getting sued either way.
The pipe dream is to come up with some kind of draft system to ensure parity. The NHL from 1995 to 2004 is a prime example of what happens when you can't ensure parity, and even they had more protections in place than college football. No leagues had salary caps before 1993, but no leagues, aside from baseball, had any meaningful free agency before then, either. You'd draft a team and you could trade guys but you could also keep the team together if you wanted to. Some leagues, like the NHL, technically had free agency, but it was restricted enough that building a team through free agency was nearly impossible, as the Scott Stevens fiasco with the Blues demonstrated. As soon as unrestricted free agency was granted, salaries skyrocketed, and even good teams couldn't stay competitive without breaking the bank. The Penguins at the time were going through bankruptcy as a perennial playoff contender with good attendance. 3 teams moved. Ratings plummeted. It took losing a whole season to a lockout to put the league back on the path to stability, and now it's in better shape than ever.
So I propose a draft. I don't know it would work, exactly, but the conferences only stand to make more money if teams like Maryland and Syracuse are competitive every once in a while. If it means Kent State wins a national championship at some point, fine. I never hear any arguments about how the Chiefs don't deserve all of their recent success because they're in a small market with no real national following (yes, they have a national following now, because they're winning, but they aren't like the Steelers or Cowboys who have national followings even when they suck). Because that argument is ridiculous. And will Clemson and Florida State go ahead and lose their fucking lawsuits already?
College Football is absolutely screaming for a Promotion-Relegation system.
A draft would destroy college football immediately. How many teams participate in the draft? It requires permanently cutting off the majority of Division 1 teams, whoever falls below that line, they'll never get a draft pick. It means completely destroying the student-athlete illusion, already very much an illusion, with a talented kid who wants to play in college forced to end up at whatever college picks him, not at his family alma mater or his state school. There would be no sense in which the players are still students.
Pro-Rel, on the other hand, would create a long-term scramble for the top. Colleges have built in fanbases, whether they are good or bad, so they don't face the limitations that pro franchises face. A pyramid system would simply make the existing layers of competitiveness explicit. It would create long term hope for every Div1 program to slowly over decades work its way up, in the same way that March Madness can build a small basketball program over time. A program could work its way up over time, getting better recruits as it works its way up to the top tier. Every team in Div1 would still be able to hold its head up and say it has a chance, one day, to play in the big time, if anything the bottom tier teams would have a theoretical path forward in a way they don't right now.
I used to think this as well, but as time goes on I am less enamored by it. It sounds good in a vacuum, but the way college football is structured makes it a nonstarter. Imagine Michigan State get relegated one year and Bowling Green promoted. The first thing that's going to happen is half of Michigan State's team is going to enter the transfer portal, and recruiting is going to dry up. Actually, recruiting is going to be more difficult for any team that finds itself in danger of relegation. Some of the players may transfer to Bowling Green. Next, Michigan State finds itself making MAC money instead of Big Ten money; their payout would go from around 60 million to around 20 million. With this money funding a bunch of non-revenue sports, first priority would be making it so these were at least able to operate. Except they're still playing in the Big Ten, which means they're still flying the women's softball team to Rutgers and USC rather than just busing them to Ypsilanti, and with these teams using their football revenue to add a ton of these sports, that expense adds up quick. Then you have the bloated athletic department and coaching salaries, which are all going to have to take a haircut (MAC teams don't pay coaches 6 million a year plus bonuses). Now they're actually at a long-term disadvantage even compared to other MAC teams, because those teams don't have unfunded liabilities from when they made more money. Relegation would essentially mean condemning the team to a death spiral, from which it would be very difficult to recover.
And it isn't like it's just going to be Michigan State. It would have to be at least one team from each division, or two per conference, that are getting relegated each year, and it wouldn't always be the same teams swapping places. It may give mid-major schools some hope that they can theoretically compete in a major conference, but it would create a similar divide within the major conferences. Some teams are always going to be good enough that they're never in danger of being relegated, and as such they'll be able to attract recruits and transfers that would otherwise have gone to lesser teams. They may not get the playing time, but recruiters can use the possibility of relegation as a bargaining chip — yeah, kid, you may get more playing time at Indiana, but you also might spend most of your career in the MAC. On the others side of the coin, the network deals are based on having certain schools drive viewership. Fox isn't going to be happy when they can't air Michigan State games anymore because now they're on ESPN's extended MAC coverage (on select local stations). It works in soccer because the clubs are independent entities without any kind of revenue sharing. Once you leagueify the whole situation to the fucked up extend college football has done, it isn't really possible.
As for the draft, I said it would be complicated, but I think it's doable. If you limited it to Power 5 schools (though that's changing) and 7 rounds like the NFL draft, you'd scoop up all the 5 and 4 star recruits and the higher end of the 3 stars. In other words, you'd only be drafting kids who aren't going to play for mid-majors anyway. Everyone else is a free agent and can go to whatever team they want. The goal isn't to distribute all the players, it's to end the current practice which is like if the team that won the Super Bowl also got the top pick in the draft. At least give the lesser schools a chance at top recruits instead of forcing them to play a power conference schedule with a roster full of 3 star guys. As far as killing the illusion of student athletes, I don't really give a fuck. We can add the student-athlete illusion to the fiction that NIL money is reasonable compensation for licensing and promotional services. I'm sure that the foundation that's paying the Texas O-line $200k each is really getting a huge return on that investment. When Jordan Addision leaves Pitt after 3 years because USC is willing to pay him more, and no one in Pittsburgh cares because you can't blame the kid for turning down that kind of money, the system is already destroyed. When Clemson is actively trying to destroy the conference it helped found and has been a member of for over 70 years because it will make more money as a member of a different conference that hasn't even extended an invitation yet, they system is already destroyed. There may have been a time when I was willing to pretend otherwise, but the past couple years have destroyed that illusion. I don't know what you're trying to hang on to at this point.
Yes you could not do this with other sports, it would have to be limited to football (maybe basketball). The other sports would continue to remain in their current conferences.
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Interesting. I think we have different visions of how it would be set up.
I think the conference system should pretty much be abolished. As you pointed out, it's already dead. Realignment is getting increasingly dumb, the numbers don't mean anything. They're profit engines. Have a top league of 15-40 national schools, and then layers below that through 200 odd division 1 schools.
Would teams lose out when relegated? Yes. But they would also win out when promoted. Literally every country does this with soccer, we can look at how it works there: teams bounce between all the time. Demotion can make life difficult, can put a team's business world in jeopardy, but that's survival of the fittest. It would give so many schools so much more to play for, week in and week out.
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What is promotion-relegation system?
Wikipedia page
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This is the way.
Relegation would also help to reinvigorate old rivalries that have been demolished because of TV contract led conference realignment.
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