Posted on 01/06/2015 2:04:12 PM PST by dangus
For universities looking to make their football teams nationally known and profitable, the great college-football realignment is likely coming to completion. There are fewer major conferences. Just a few short years ago, the Big East was 5-0 in bowl games, but now survives only as the weak American Athletic Conference. The WAC no longer sponsors football at all. The Conference USA is an empty shell. Even the Mountain West Conference, despite subsuming the best of the WAC and Big West, is weaker than it once was.
The Big 12 may be looking to expand back to 12 teams from 10. That will be the last chance any up-and-coming teams will have to hit the big time. Some say the Big 10 could still pluck Texas from the Big 12, but that would be bad for the up-and-comers: such a move would be more likely to trigger a Big-East-style collapse of the Big 12 than make room for new teams in a power conference. So two teams will move up to the big time. My advice to the rest of the conferences is to disband.
One new power conference could possibly emerge, but at the cost of all other football conferences. Sports hates odd numbers, and there will be plenty of also-rans after the Big 12 takes its pick of them. These teams -- minus the two that get promoted -- could form a trans-American conference like the AAC hoped it could become: Air Force, BYU, Boise St., Rice, Houston, Utah St., Memphis, Cincinnati, E. Carolina, Navy, S. Florida, C. Florida, Memphis, Army and Marshall. You can see where there would be natural East and West divisions.
But to any team that does not form such a Conference of Miscellaneous Teams: give up football. A 50,000-seat stadium is too expensive for six home games per year. So is chartering a jet of 85 players… and paying for 85 scholarships. Even with all the licensing, TV deals, etc., only the best of the best football programs actually come anywhere near covering their costs. Far more cost each student thousands of dollars over four years.
Yes, a surge to national prominence can lift an entire school; just ask the University of Maryland. But Maryland was already in a major conference. Sorry, U-Conn: the only way you're going to attract attention is by resuming your greatness in basketball. Maybe Georgetown and Villanova will still let you play with them. Meanwhile, do you know what's *not* good for your reputation? Creating an entire program of courses that 85 football players can pass.
I'm not calling football players dumb jocks. Many professional athletes are far more intelligent than anyone suspects. But college football players are not putting academics first, and if we're talking about building national reputations, the courses *should* be challenging to someone who *is* putting academics first.
Time to move on. There's always basketball. And if you're trying to find something to excite your student body on a Saturday afternoon and you only have 15,000 fans to entertain, a 15,000-seat arena just makes more sense than an 80,000-seat stadium. Or you could actually put the focus of a university athletics program back on such things as health, sportsmanly competition and such by promoting participation rather than spectating. And we could save billions of dollars to put to education.
I second you.
I’ll tell you what would be real cool....if each of the final 5 or 6 conferences had minor conference affiliates. Say the Big 10’s minor conference affiliate was the MAC. The PAC 10’s minor conference affiliate was the Mountain West. Or something along those lines.
Here is the cool part. At the end of each season the lowest ranked team in the major conference would take on the highest ranked team in the minor affiliate conference. If the minor affiliate wins, they get to play up with the big boys next year and play the schedule of the major school. Each team would have to go back to their original conference the next year so that you wouldn’t have a perpetual swapping of the same teams but at least they could make it up to the big time every two years. And a crappy team could end up being forced to play down in the minor conference every two years if they kept sucking year after year.
I am looking at you Indiana.
After all, this is the point of the suit by the Northwestern University football team, isn't it?
I do not agree at all. I come from a school which had very few great teams but fans supported them every year. Football brings in money for the schools. We have had good basketball and baseball teams but they never bring in the money like football does. People who try to tell people in the SEC that there will be no more football will have a big fight on their hands. I have loved MSU football since I was about 8/9 years old. Jack Cristil, Voice of the Bulldogs taught me the game way back then. Five members of my family that I know of went to the bowl game. They drove 14 hours each way to attend. It was a family affair.
Amen.
The University of Chicago dropped its football program back about 1940, and it still has more Heisman Trophy winners than the other UC, the one in Berkeley. On the other hand, Cal has a living Super Bowl MVP and Chicago doesn’t.
O: Nonsense!
M: (exasperated) Oh, this is futile!!
(pause)
O: No it isn’t!
M: Yes it is!
(pause)
M: I came here for a good argument!
O: AH, no you didn’t, you came here for an argument!
M: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn’t.
M: Yes it is! It’s not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn’t!
Read the article.
Your school’s football team MAKES MONEY for your school? Then YES, KEEP IT!!! I’m talking about the 200 money-bleeding programs that have vainly been hoping that someday they will join your beloved Mississippi State in the SEC, or build into a conference to rival the SEC.
The problem begins with the fact that ESPN and the so-called Power 5 conferences have rigged the game in their favor starting with the bullshiite BCS and now this farce of a playoff. During the BCS era the rules stated that if a conference met certain metrics over a 3 year period they would be included as an Automatic Qualifier conference. Well from 2004 to 2010 the Mountain West met all the metrics and were still kept out. Every MWC tem over that period had multiple non conference wins over BCS schools. Utah destroyed Alabama in the 2009 Sugar Bowl. TCU beat Wisconsin in the 2011 Rose Bowl. In 2010 when Boise St, then a member of the WAC and TCU both became BCS busters, the powers that be decided to match them up in the Fiesta Bowl. There was no way in hell they were going to let two “Blueblood” schools get beat in the same year by so-called mid-major schools. A year later the MWC was raided by the Big XII and the Pac-10 losing TCU, and Utah. BYU left the conference to try their hand at being an independent. The MWC was forced to backfill with WAC schools. The MWC was effectively neutered.
The monopoly held by the Power 5 is destroying college football. They are doing everything in their power to ensure there will never be another Boise St, Utah or TCU that will come up and prove what a farce the system they and ESPN have come up with is.
The only way there will ever be a TRUE FBS champ is to have a 16 team playoff that includes the champs from all 10 conferences. Until that day happens it is all smoke and mirrors.
Two words (one hyphenated) that will change college football within most of our lifetimes:
unionization (if it does hold up)
concussion-lawsuits (because we wouldn’t want any lawyers on welfare, would we).
Those two factors may be enough to do in a boatload of marginal programs.
I couldn’t disagree more. Now you’re stoking the vain hopes of the little guys... for what? Ohio has decided Ohio State is the flagship. Why create some wierd competition with Kent State? Because Kent State finds some coach they hire in the future is a great coach? Then “promote” him to Ohio State. The actual players will be gone before the school “moves up.” IN the meanwhile, you continue the fever that infects all the Kent States and UABs and Southern Floridas and UNC-Charlottes and Old Dominions of the world: that they can buy their way into prominence by selling out their academics for jocks.
You say, “I’m looking at you, Indiana.” Let’s talk about the real effect: Duke would have been sent down, never been able to recruit good players, and would have gotten eventually replaced by some other big state school like UNC-Charlotte. Which would then want ANOTHER 80,000-seat arena to compete with NC St and UNC, which taxpayers would have had to pay for.
I say, keep the Dukes, the Clemsons, the Vanderbilts, the Syracuses, the Northwesterns. If Bryan Harsin (of Boise St.) wants, he can take a job with Utah. But why let a great coach result in Idaho spend another three hundred million dollars trying to get a team into the Pac-32? It just doesn’t make sense.
sean what you write is absolutely true. But why should the taxpayers pay for 120 college football stadiums when 50 would do fine? From a position of sports fairness, it sucks that the MWC was robbed of rising to the list of “major conferences.” But so what if it did? What benefit is there to the state of Utah that Boise State play alongside Utah and TCU for a chance at a real bowl game?
I almost prefer dfwgator’s idea: Bunch them into four conferences, and let the rest of the colleges get over it.
Fully agree.
You’re supposed to go to university to learn, not play football. Football just turns university into an extension of high school and pretty much introduces completely worthless idiots into the academic environment.
I bet you anything that if we eliminated football programs, the cost of schooling would collapse and all those football groupies would avoid university. Too many towns are trashed by football teams and their fans.
How many stadiums are needed? Why not just have one or two and second, taxpayers have no business being burdened by having to pay for football stadiums for university football players.
True to idiot form, my college (ETSU) is actually trying to fund reinstating of football program! They are unable to see they are being exploited by the local business devils, to float bond debt we taxpayers will end up with. My property taxes always go up, every year, and the services do not increase or even improve. If I could find a way to get out of this tax cesspool I would be gone, brother.
“I agree, and while we’re at it, let’s not go to an art gallery when we aren’t related to the artists. And don’t get me started about going to a concert where you’re nephew isn’t the bass player!”
Or go to a movie or watch a TV show if no one in it is a relative or read a novel unless one is related to the author.
“taxpayers have no business being burdened by having to pay for football stadiums for university football players”
I think almost all college sports facilities are funded by alumni donations. And BTW, ALL other competitive college sports (male & female), with the possible exception of male basketball, are funded by money made from football and would not be possible without football.
That said, I prefer most of my relatives to be distant.
Yes and no.
College sports programs bleed money by the tens of millions, with taxpayers paying the brunt of it. This doesn’t count alumni-funded facilities.
But while some alumni often fund the a large part of the stadium itself, the state usually pays for the infrastructure, parking garages, and all that. When the alumni actually do pay for something, it’s because the chancellor convinces them that the stadium will bring prestige to the university and the alumnus figures that the Joe Smith Stadium sounds so much more cool than the Joe Smith Business Library or the Joe Smith Residence Hall.
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