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College Football Realignment

Was doing research on pre WW2 offenses for inspiration on my CFB 25 offensive playbook when I stumbled upon this article:

www.history.com

How Military Service Teams Dominated College Football During World War II | HISTORY

'Bear' Bryant, who became a legend at Alabama, and future Pro Football Hall of Famers were among the all-star collect...
www.history.com www.history.com

Not the first time coaches had to juggle with who was on the team like today.
 
Virginia Tech is a fine academic institution, but Finebaum’s larger point is correct even if he muddled the language a bit. The SEC wants flagship state universities. That is why Virginia would be in over Virginia Tech and North Carolina would be in over NC State or Duke.
 
Creebuzz said:
Virginia Tech is a fine academic institution, but Finebaum’s larger point is correct even if he muddled the language a bit. The SEC wants flagship state universities. That is why Virginia would be in over Virginia Tech and North Carolina would be in over NC State or Duke.
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that's how I read that statement as well. minus the lack of an AI Finebaum translator (brought to you by Love's Country Store).
 
Buffnik said:
Most of those are ridiculously excessive. It's not making sense to me.
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The only thing I can think of, is that it provides lattitude for schools to go to 105 schollies in FB, and raise the number of schollies in women's sports that they carry to match.

The other possible thing is the fake dollars calculated for providing a scholly can be counted as revenue sharing with athletes. So add 15 more schollies valued at $90k/year each for bowling to the ledger, and you don't have to disburse as much actual cash.
 
skibum said:
You also have to look at these changes in the broader picture where enrollment at US colleges and universities is declining fast - google "college enrollment cliff" if you are currently unaware. Nationally, enrollment is expected to drop by 100,000 students per year every year for the next 4-5 years. That's half a million customers simply disappearing.

So, you're in an industry with a massively declining customer base, what do you do?

The answer is to set yourself apart as a leader ASAP to maintain your customer base and your position while those at the bottom suffer the pain.

Right now, aside from a very, very few highly selective universities and the University of Colorado Main Campus, every school in the country is trying to maximize its appeal to enrolling students, and if you can increase your appeal, while also decreasing other schools' appeal, of course you're going to do it.

We are absolutely going to see a slew of schools moving down to D2 - that is 100% intentional.
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FIFY
 
skibum said:
You also have to look at these changes in the broader picture where enrollment at US colleges and universities is declining fast - google "college enrollment cliff" if you are currently unaware. Nationally, enrollment is expected to drop by 100,000 students per year every year for the next 4-5 years. That's half a million customers simply disappearing.

So, you're in an industry with a massively declining customer base, what do you do?

The answer is to set yourself apart as a leader ASAP to maintain your customer base and your position while those at the bottom suffer the pain.

Right now, aside from a very, very few highly selective universities, every school in the country is trying to maximize its appeal to enrolling students, and if you can increase your appeal, while also decreasing other schools' appeal, of course you're going to do it.

We are absolutely going to see a slew of schools moving down to D2 - that is 100% intentional.
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It's going to be interesting to see where this goes. Like, do we see tuition come down?

As for the part of your argument about differentiating to their future customers, I'm skeptical that there are enough HS kids that really care that much about conference given that most dont ever watch live sports (those that do only watch highlights on social media after its over).

To me these moves are more about locking up whats left of the TV audience for their advertisers.

The good news for Junior is that he's taking a gap year. After which he will attend community college before trying to transfer. He could be my kid that goes to CU.
 
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Buffnik said:
On the one hand, they're raising scholarships so high for non-revenue sports that it becomes easier to add a bunch of women's scholarships to gain Title IX balance. But they're also making it so that matching men's and women's sports have the same scholarship allotments, which works against Title IX balance (with some sports now having more men's scholarships than women's). So that doesn't seem to be the motivation.

So, I thought maybe the focus was to put an end to walk-on status or partial scholarships to avoid NIL abuse of stacking rosters and stashing players, while ensuring that teams had large enough practice rosters to continue conducting their programs as they currently do without the elimination of walk-ons becoming burdensome. It seems to work that way for football (105) and basketball (15), but there's no way a men's lacrosse team needs 48 players or currently has that many as the standard with that many walk-ons (currently 12.6 scholarships) or that women's rowing with 20 current scholarships needed to go to 68 to put every partial scholarship and walk-on in the program on scholarship.

I'm very confused on this because the allocations don't seem to match with a consistent goal.
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They are passing the buck and taking it out of the hands of the NCAA. It is now a problem for each school to address Title IX and gender equity.

Thos numbers apply to all D1 programs. We already can easily name multiple D1 programs that don't fund to the old level.

One example is that Cross Country currently allows 11 full scholarships between men and women (5M, 6W) Track and Field currently is 30.6 (12.6M, 18W.) At most schools distance runners on scholarship are expected to do both to help field a full team.

The new limits for Cross Country is 17 per gender or 34 total and 45 per gender for track totaling 90.

Schools like Northern Colorado don't even fully fund their current football limits and that is a revenue sport. CU is under a mandate to self-fund athletics. These limits would be the equivelent of adding another football roster to the expense sheet just for running sports.

What we are going to see is a large number of schools that drop some sports entirely because they can't fund to compete (If Mark Wetmore had been able to fund 34 runners what other schools in the current B12 would even bother to try to compete?) or have the entire school drop to a lower level of competition.

With these kinds of expenses needed to compete and seeing them already non-competitive in the Big Sky give a good reason that Northern Colorado shouldn't go back to D2, a number of MWC schools would make sense to replace them in the FCS Big Sky.

Essentially what this comes down to is a removal of practical scholarship limits and putting compliance in the hands of the schools themselves. Have 105 males on football scholarship. Keep your men's golf team at 5 scholarship and put 15 women on full ride, do the same with tennis and other sports until you are as close to compliance as you want to be, no longer the NCAA's problem.
 
Denver_sc said:
Absurd.

A horse doesn’t have the advanced brain function to produce speech, much less process a collegiate-level curricula.

Talk about taking the “student” out of “student athlete”.
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Mister Ed would like a word
 
MiamiBuffs said:
It's going to be interesting to see where this goes. Like, do we see tuition come down?

As for the part of your argument about differentiating to their future customers, I'm skeptical that there are enough HS kids that really care that much about conference given that most dont ever watch live sports (those that do only watch highlights on social media after its over).
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At this point, it's not going to be "what conference, are they in" but "they're not even a division 1 school."

They're not the state's flagship university, they're not AAU, they're not D1, they're not tier 1 research, they're not ______.

Serious schools are all of those things, and that's where you should attend.

The more things you can throw in that sentence, the better, and you better believe the schools are absolutely aware of this.

Hell, how much grief we will give the sheep if they have to drop to D2 for the majority of their sports?

All that **** runs downhill, and it's about making sure enrollment for the schools at the top does not decline.
 
One thing to consider is while the U.S. population went from 216M to 331M over the past 50 years the number of D1 football scholarships were cut. It resulted in a lot more parity with no major conference program being hopeless, a number of G5s elevating to P5, more G5s being a dangerous out or even favored vs some P5s, and a bunch of programs elevating from FCS/ 1-AA.

We're going to see a reverse of this 50-year trend with the expanded rosters, transfer rules and financial changes (especially if player "salaries" are coming on top of NIL).
 
Buffnik said:
One thing to consider is while the U.S. population went from 216M to 331M over the past 50 years the number of D1 football scholarships were cut. It resulted in a lot more parity with no major conference program being hopeless, a number of G5s elevating to P5, more G5s being a dangerous out or even favored vs some P5s, and a bunch of programs elevating from FCS/ 1-AA.

We're going to see a reverse of this 50-year trend with the expanded rosters, transfer rules and financial changes (especially if player "salaries" are coming on top of NIL).
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Plus there has been more than a healthy drop in parents outside of the South allowing their kids to play youth football due to CTE awareness.
 
Bison said:

Been seeing stuff that the MWC is losing interest in the 2PAC schools or more like the 2PAC schools are just waiting their turn in 2026.
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I still think that 24 team conferences will either fail, or slowly erode CFB.

Students won't see more than 2 opponents multiple times in the 4 to 6 years that they're undergrads.

Playing true round robins, at least in a division, had so much to do with the rivalries and tradition that make CFB so great.
 
Robert Sorell said:
I still think that 24 team conferences will either fail, or slowly erode CFB.

Students won't see more than 2 opponents multiple times in the 4 to 6 years that they're undergrads.

Playing true round robins, at least in a division, had so much to do with the rivalries and tradition that make CFB so great.
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This actually could be the path to rationality.

Assume we end up with 3 "power" conferences at 24 each.

Now, further assume (and this is a big assumption, but it could happen) that the media contracts and payouts for those three are moderately close.

Given timing of when they each "go to market" one might be larger for a bit, but then in a couple years the others could catch up or even exceed, etc, etc.

If that's the reality, it becomes much easier (from a dollars and cents standpoint) for the three conferences to join together and realign into divisions that make sense.

They would need an anti trust exemption from congress to do it, but if they coalesced around a plan I bet they could get it.
 
Robert Sorell said:
I still think that 24 team conferences will either fail, or slowly erode CFB.

Students won't see more than 2 opponents multiple times in the 4 to 6 years that they're undergrads.

Playing true round robins, at least in a division, had so much to do with the rivalries and tradition that make CFB so great.
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Hard to predict how scheduling would work in this case but if this means CU will be facing more regional schools as a result, that will be great. If I could redo CU's Big 12 schedule this year, I'd throw out Cincy for Arizona State and Baylor for BYU. I don't think Cincy, UCF, and WVU fans would be disappointed with adding ACC teams. Maybe we would have divisions again and they would be:

West: OrSU, WSU, Utah, BYU, UA, ASU, CU, OkSU, TT, TCU, KU, and KSU.
East: BU, Houston, ISU, Cincy, UCF, WVU, Clemson, FSU, NCSU, VT, Louisville, and GT.

Basketball scheduling would be like this:

CU would face all 11 of their West rivals and there would be three round robin games out of that group. CU would face half of the East which means CU visits every East team in a four year period.

Football scheduling would be like this:

B12 goes to ten conference games. Seven games against the West every year and three against the East every year. CU would face each East team in a four year period. That means CU has no more than two trips out east every year and the B12 would make sure that no East team has to travel to both WSU and OrSU in the same year.
 
Creebuzz said:
Virginia Tech is a fine academic institution, but Finebaum’s larger point is correct even if he muddled the language a bit. The SEC wants flagship state universities. That is why Virginia would be in over Virginia Tech and North Carolina would be in over NC State or Duke.
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The SEC will take whichever teams they think will generate the most new income. That is the only consideration.
 
Bison said:
Hard to predict how scheduling would work in this case but if this means CU will be facing more regional schools as a result, that will be great. If I could redo CU's Big 12 schedule this year, I'd throw out Cincy for Arizona State and Baylor for BYU. I don't think Cincy, UCF, and WVU fans would be disappointed with adding ACC teams. Maybe we would have divisions again and they would be:

West: OrSU, WSU, Utah, BYU, UA, ASU, CU, OkSU, TT, TCU, KU, and KSU.
East: BU, Houston, ISU, Cincy, UCF, WVU, Clemson, FSU, NCSU, VT, Louisville, and GT.

Basketball scheduling would be like this:

CU would face all 11 of their West rivals and there would be three round robin games out of that group. CU would face half of the East which means CU visits every East team in a four year period.

Football scheduling would be like this:

B12 goes to ten conference games. Seven games against the West every year and three against the East every year. CU would face each East team in a four year period. That means CU has no more than two trips out east every year and the B12 would make sure that no East team has to travel to both WSU and OrSU in the same year.
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It's a stupid loop.

Let's tear apart the old conferences and make a super conference with divisions.

I'm looking forward to the AllState Good Hands conference Midwest division of Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa State, Missouri, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State; that emerges from this mess in ten years.
 
MtnBuff said:
They are passing the buck and taking it out of the hands of the NCAA. It is now a problem for each school to address Title IX and gender equity.

Thos numbers apply to all D1 programs. We already can easily name multiple D1 programs that don't fund to the old level.

One example is that Cross Country currently allows 11 full scholarships between men and women (5M, 6W) Track and Field currently is 30.6 (12.6M, 18W.) At most schools distance runners on scholarship are expected to do both to help field a full team.

The new limits for Cross Country is 17 per gender or 34 total and 45 per gender for track totaling 90.

Schools like Northern Colorado don't even fully fund their current football limits and that is a revenue sport. CU is under a mandate to self-fund athletics. These limits would be the equivelent of adding another football roster to the expense sheet just for running sports.

What we are going to see is a large number of schools that drop some sports entirely because they can't fund to compete (If Mark Wetmore had been able to fund 34 runners what other schools in the current B12 would even bother to try to compete?) or have the entire school drop to a lower level of competition.

With these kinds of expenses needed to compete and seeing them already non-competitive in the Big Sky give a good reason that Northern Colorado shouldn't go back to D2, a number of MWC schools would make sense to replace them in the FCS Big Sky.

Essentially what this comes down to is a removal of practical scholarship limits and putting compliance in the hands of the schools themselves. Have 105 males on football scholarship. Keep your men's golf team at 5 scholarship and put 15 women on full ride, do the same with tennis and other sports until you are as close to compliance as you want to be, no longer the NCAA's problem.
Click to expand...
 
skibum said:
You also have to look at these changes in the broader picture where enrollment at US colleges and universities is declining fast - google "college enrollment cliff" if you are currently unaware. Nationally, enrollment is expected to drop by 100,000 students per year every year for the next 4-5 years. That's half a million customers simply disappearing.
Click to expand...

This article paints a different picture on enrollment
 
Big XII Twitter is doing a conference roll call on the first official day for all new members. I completely forgot that WVU was part of this conference lol.
 
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