What fan-centered sports conferences would look like.

Dangus

[dangus]

Sports fans like rivalries. They like basketball rivals that play home-and-away games. They like football rivals who play every year. They like following their teams to rivals’ homes, when they can. The great College Sports road trip tradition must not be lost! Today’s conferences are designed to compete for contracts with sports networks proliferating on a dying cable-TV industry, even though in waning industries, consolidation is the norm. Below, then, is what the conferences of the NCAA might look like if the conferences constituted themselves to foster fan enjoyment, rather than competing to gobble up TV markets.

But first let me emphasize that this is NOT a prediction. Please don’t tell me that such and such conference would never forego such and such TV contract, locked up until 2035. It’s worth envisioning an ideal, however unlikely.

What does an ideal conference look like, for the fans? Eight or nine teams that can play each other every season in football, and twice every season in basketball. The NCAA could facilitate this a bit in football, by allowing conference vs. conference matchups where today there are conference title games. These conferences should be based in large part on geography, so that fans from conference rivals can attend rivals’ home games. And they should be of similar enough institutions so as to make rivalries natural: despite their proximity, Evansville and Indiana are not natural rivals.

So here are the major football conferences:

1. A core of Big-Ten colleges: Ohio St., Michigan St., Michigan, Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Northwestern. For now, I presume Notre Dame does not join a football conference.

2. A new power joins the core Pac-8: California, UCLA, USC, Stanford and yes, San Diego St., plus Oregon, Oregon St., Washington, Washington St.

3. A new power joins the core of the SEC: Alabama, Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss, Miss St., Vanderbilt, Arkansas, Memphis.

4. A Texas-centered conference: Texas, TCU, Texas Tech, Baylor, Texas A&M, Houston, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State. Let’s face it: Neither Kansas nor West Virginia have population enough to be a mid-sized Texas city.

5. A South Atlantic conference for in-state rivalries to flourish: Florida, Florida St., Miami, Central Florida, Clemson, South Carolina, Georgia, Georgia Tech. South Florida someday?

6. The Not-So-Deep South: Virginia, Virginia Tech, North Carolina, N.C. State, Wake Forest, Duke, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisville, Cincinnati

7. A Northeastern conference, finally. Seven teams from within a few miles of Pennsylvania: Penn State, Pittsburgh, Temple (in Philly), West Virginia (less than 10 miles outside PA), Navy, Maryland, and Rutgers. Add in Syracuse and Boston College, and you have a whole conference within travel distance for those cadets (who had joined the American for football only).

8. The Great Open Plains states: Colorado, Air Force, Nebraska, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Wichita State (non-football), Tulsa, Colorado St. Someday Wyoming? A Dakota school?

9. The Big West: Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, Utah State, New Mexico, UNLV, Nevada, Boise State, (Maybe Washington?)

The major Basketball conferences:

1. The Old Big East, swapping out football schools: Georgetown, Villanova, Seton Hall, St. John’s, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, U-Mass

2. The Midwestern Big East and Atlantic 10 powers join forces: Dayton, Xavier, DePaul, Marquette, St. Louis, Duquesne, Butler, Creighton and yes, Notre Dame. Six conference rivals for Notre Dame within four hours, and all in major cities!

3. Virginia-area basketball A-10 teams join Southern Appalachian teams to form a strong mid-major: VCU, GMU, George Washington, Richmond, Liberty, Eastern Tennessee St (ETSU), UNC-Greensboro (UNCG), Furman, Western Carolina, Wofford.

4. As long as BYU doesn’t join a football conference, the WCC seems likely to stay intact.

5. The Break-up of the Atlantic 10 leaves some lesser teams to spur realignment. (a) LaSalle, St. Joseph’s and Fordham join Manhattan, Iona, St. Peter’s, Monmouth and Marist, Siena and Rider; (b) St. Bonaventure's joins Niagara, Canisius, Robert Morris, St. Francis, Colgate, Bucknell and Mt St Mary’s. (c) That leaves Lafayette and Lehigh to join Drexel, Delaware, Towson, Loyola Maryland, Howard, Hofstra and NJIT.

“mid-major” football conferences:

1. Tulane joins Texas St., UT-San Antonio, Rice, North Texas, Louisiana Tech, Louisiana, Louisiana Monroe and Southern Mississippi.

2. ECU (and South Florida?) joins Old Dominion, Charlotte, App State, Coastal Carolina, Georgia State, Georgia Southern, Florida International, Florida Atlantic, UAB.

3. Marshall and yes, a lost Massachusetts join Toledo, Bowling Green, Ohio, Buffalo, Akron and Kent State in the East MAC

4. Western Kentucky and Mid-Tennessee State U (MTSU) joins Miami OH, Ball State, Northern Illinois, W. Michigan, C. Michigan and E. Michigan

[dfwgator]

Bring back the Southwest Conference.

[bagster]

I guess Fresno State is ass out.

☹

[cloudmountain]

We humans haven't changed ONE iota. We still have the same “Roman Coliseum" mentality as ever did the Romans.

Isn't there one or two Demogog-ocrats that you would enjoy feeding to the lions?
No, the lions would get sick and die after eating those four FOUL women. Better to just leave them to do themselves in. They will grow old. They'll be alone because they are so miserable now.

They will be terribly unhappy because they don't have our Lord in their life. Maybe they'll finally leave this country that they hate. Not a good future for them unless they change.

[RegulatorCountry]

Tennessee is very vested in their SEC identity and would never go along with being an appendage of basically the ACC. You’ve stripped the ACC of its only real football schools so there’s nothing there for the Vols.

[cloudmountain]

College sports ARE the best to watch or attend.
The young men in high school aren't quite good enough to make the games that good. The pros go about their game like a business, not much excitement on the part of the players. It's "ho-hum" for them.

But ANYTHING can happen at the college level--big surprises, amazing losses and fabulous LAST SECOND wins. The young men are good but they aren't "ho-hum" yet and the BIG games are THE BEST because of all that ENTHUSIASM!!!

[sphinx]

The traditional conferences as they existed through the 1960's were pretty good. They had grown organically over decades. They were based on proximity and natural rivalries, with a few oddities like Northwestern in the Big Ten and Vanderbilt in the SEC. They made sense geographically. They had great traditional rivalries. Fans could travel fairly easily.

Then two things happened. The colleges basically walked away from any pretense of maintaining academic standards. That had been a problem area before with a lot of cheating going on, but the respectable conferences made an effort to hold on to at least minimal standards. That couldn't survive the racial politics of the 60's and 70's. At the same time, the colleges sold out to television. And so they've turned the revenue sports into nothing more than professional farm teams.

At this point, it's not salvageable. Get the pros off campus. Return college sports to a club basis. The alums can still tailgate and drink all they want. The pros can run their own farm systems. And college athletes can revert to being real students earning real degrees -- which most of them outside of the elite programs still are, as most college athletes know perfectly well that they're not going to be pros or Olympians. The tv networks can go pound sand.

[Jim Noble]

if the conferences constituted themselves to foster fan enjoyment, rather than competing to gobble up TV markets

Why would they do that?

The PURPOSE of these programs is money.

[RonnG]

Notre Dame is the only winner in that scenario.

[Buckeye McFrog]

If you really want to sell this idea play up the reduced carbon footprint from shorter travel distances.

[Hessian]

What happened to Iowa?

[dangus]

>> Tennessee is very vested in their SEC identity and would never go along with being an appendage of basically the ACC. You’ve stripped the ACC of its only real football schools so there’s nothing there for the Vols. <<

Good point. I should have left Tenn in the core SEC. I’m not sure what I was thinking: the “core SEC “ has 8 listed and the ACC has 10. Might have been a simple copy-and-paste error.

[dangus]

Except Arkansas and Rice, I sorta did. I’m certainly open to the notion that Arkansas, so close to OK, belongs in the Texas-OK conference. I figured, however, that Rice is no longer a football power and doesn’t fit in with “the big boys” anymore.

[dangus]

Oops. That’s all I can say. I intended to put it in the Great Plains, with Nebraska, Iowa St., Colorado, etc. That’d probably piss them off BIG TIME.

I figure the conference needed to get such a ball rolling would be the Big 10... that they could fall back to their core, without losing money on a per-school basis. (No-one in Maryland or New Jersey gives a crap about the Big 10, and Nebraska doesn’t do anything for the Big 10.) If it takes Iowa staying with the “10” to keep its name and voting schools, so be it.

[dangus]

I don’t know what to make out of Fresno St. Their record the last several years (as I’m guessing you know better than I did) was 0-8, 7-1, 7-1, 2-6. ????

I’m more into basketball, and Fresno State is pretty bad. 1 tournament appearance this century, and they’ve lost 6 straight post-season games (as in, NIT and NCAA). But I recognize football is more important...

[dangus]

Because fans are what generate the money. The TV wars are just that ... wars. And wars hurt. Reconfiguring the conferences would mean no fewer net viewers; the problem is that reshuffling means there are winners and losers, and the would-be losers won’t care what’s best in total.

[dangus]

It certainly would mean reduced costs. But in the most important cases, that’s not much compared to the TV license fees.

[Reily]

As a WVU fan I like because it puts old rivalries back together. However I doubt the TV revenue would be sufficient and that’s what its all about! Quote from a WVU senior official whose office I was in on the day they announced their switch to the Big 12, “We could lose every game and it still doubles our TV revenue!”.

[dangus]

>> As a WVU fan I like because it puts old rivalries back together. However I doubt the TV revenue would be sufficient and that’s what its all about! Quote from a WVU senior official whose office I was in on the day they announced their switch to the Big 12, “We could lose every game and it still doubles our TV revenue!”. <<

Which says how dysfunctional the current system is. The Big 12 nabbed West Virginia in a moment of fleeting desperation and panic. The irony is that the Big 10 included Maryland and Rutgers — two teams with no business being in the Big 10 — because they wanted access to the Eastern Metropolis TV markets... but a conference with BC, Rutgers (NYC area), Maryland (DC area), Temple (Philly), Navy (Balt. area) and Pitt (and WV, Penn State and Syracuse) couldn’t work? Does anyone REALLY think that NY-area fans would watch Rutgers play Michigan, Illinois or Iowa when they wouldn’t watch Rutgers play Navy, West Virginia or Temple? I’ll tell you what, though... Those Temple fans would help fill up Rutgers’ stadium!

(Trivia fact: Rutgers wouldn’t join Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Yale et al in the Ivy League because at the time it thought those schools focused too much on athletics at the expense of scholarship.)