At any given time on the sporting calendar, the biggest contraversy you'll hear surrounding college football is its lack of a proper postseason. Although those cries are loudest when you have a situation like what we had this prior season with five undefeated teams at the end of the regular season and only two playing for the title, or back in 2003, when the SEC Champions went undefeated and were totally snubbed from the process, the offseason is usually when you hear the most chatter about people trying to get the powers that be to reform. That's not the case this year. Something else, something big (as you'd expect a story knocking off the talk about college football playoffs should be) has popped up on the radar, and it's not spring practices either.Expansion.
One of the big issues with college football has been the disparity in numbers among the BCS conferences. The Big 12, SEC and ACC all have 12 teams, split into two six-team divisions with a Championship game at the end of their regular season. The Big 10, Pac 10 and Big East all do not. There have been calls for each of those conferences to expand and have to have 12 teams in them in order to retain their BCS eligibility. The Big 10, with 11 teams already, has been courting Notre Dame for the longest time to complete their dozen. However, Notre Dame keeps rejecting their advances.
While the Big 10 hasn't stopped courting Notre Dame, they've turned their attentions to contingiency plans. They've inquired about Rutgers so they can get their foot in the New York City market. Pittsburgh's been on their radar because of it's within the conference's geographical footprint and has a strong football tradition as well as being a natural rival for Penn State. They've lusted after Missouri, which makes sense with its natural rivalry with Illinois as well their emergence as a football powerhouse as well as a traditional basketball staple. Nebraska has been mentioned as well. Hell, even Vanderbilt, which would bring a lot of academic clout to the conference, has been floated as an option.
In typical American-way fashion, the Big 10 just said "Fuck it, let's grab as many of these teams as we can and create a SUPER conference." The word out of Big 10 offices is that they want to go to a 16-team conference. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a game-changer to me. If they indeed get their way, and I have a feeling that they will, then it will signal the end of college football as we know it and usher in an arms race the likes of which college football has never seen before.
Let's just say that the Big 10 entices Notre Dame, Nebraska, Missouri, Pitt and Rutgers to join the conference. The SEC would then take notice, because as the benchmark football conference in all of America, they'd have to keep up with the Big 10 lest they fall behind in national perception. Remember, in college football, perception is everything because it gets you better bowl berths and an inside track to the BCS Championship game, which not only hightens the prestige of the conference, but brings in more money via the big bowl payoff as well as TV revenue. So they'd have a couple of options.
One, they could move to the west and try to grab the football powerhouses from Texas and Oklahoma. Texas would be the big prize, as they boast two BCS title-game appearances in the last five years as well as a BCS National Championship. They'd also get Texas A&M by default since all reports say that Texas wouldn't bolt from the Big 12 without taking it's little brother school with it. Oklahoma and Oklahoma State would be logical choices as well, seeing as how they also bring football prestige with them as well as natural rivalries with not only the Texas schools, but with Arkansas as well. More importantly, Oklahoma and especially Texas are fertile recruiting grounds. Road trips out to Austin, Norman and the like would provide ample opportunities for SEC coaches and recruiters to pay top prospects face-to-face visits, and those are so important when it comes to luring top talent to your college.
The other option would be to look to the east. In the same way the ACC raided the Big East for Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech nearly a decade ago, the SEC in turn could poach Miami, Florida State, Clemson, Georgia Tech or even any of the North Carolina schools from the ACC. That is, unless the ACC acts preemptively and adds schools from a rapidly disintegrating Big East conference again. West Virginia would be the big prize, although Syracuse, which could also go to the Big 10 as part of a fortification of the New York market, Connecticut, Louisville and Cincinnati could be catches as well.
Then there's the Pac-10, which has longed to get into the Denver market for a long time and would like nothing more but to add Colorado to its ranks. Adding Colorado would almost certainly mean they'd go after Utah or BYU (preferably Utah because of BYU's religious affiliations) as well, which would make it the Pac-12. However, if the SEC and Big 10 go for 16, the West Coasters would almost certainly follow suit. They'd also be big players in the Texas and Oklahoma sweepstakes, and who knows what other schools within their geographical footprint, be it mid-major or major, they'd be looking to add.
What would this all mean? It would almost certainly spell the end of the Big 12 and Big East conferences, for one. Mega-expansion isn't coming at the expense of the mid-majors, mainly because conferences like the Big 10 and SEC see themselves as the elite of the elite in terms of football. They're not going to add the Akrons or UABs of the world for the sake of having 16 teams. It just so happens that the Big 12 and Big East are sort of in the crossroads of each of those conferences geographical footprints, both existing and desired.
Secondly, it might get us closer to what we really want, and that's, you guessed it, postseason reform! If the number of major conferences is pared from six conferences of varying membership to four or maybe five super-conferences (for all intents and purposes, the Mountain West stands to gain some membership from old Big 12 orphans that don't get snapped up by other frames), then it would be easier to implement some kind of playoff system. Especially if that number is four, there would be no real obstacle for a two-round, four team playoff featuring the four superconference winners. With five superconferences, well, it would depend on the strength of that fifth conference, but really, would it be that hard to have an eight-team playoff anyway?
For as intriguing as this is, it's also scary, as most forays into the unknown tend to be. Overcentralization has proven to be a risky and inefficient way of dealing with things, and let's not kid ourselves here, what the Big 10 is looking to do is begin the overcentralization of college football. Fewer administrators will be looking after larger amalgamations of schools that all have their own agendas. That sounds like an invitation for more bureaucracy in a sport already overrun by red tape. Not to mention it would alienate some conference rivals from each other due to bloated conferences not allowing enough games to have teams play each other without sacrificing out-of-conference games.
Still, for good or bad, this drama will end up being interesting to say the least. The landscape of college football is changing, and whether you like it or not, we may be on the doorstep of major sports history being about to unfold.
The above may seem wordy and thorough, but believe me, folks, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything I've laid out here is basically my understanding from what I've read on two outstanding college football blogs and bloggers, either from their original reporting or from sources they've linked on their sites. One is Matt Hinton of Dr. Saturday and the other is Spencer "Orson Swindle" Hall of Every Day Should Be Saturday. Hinton's blog is more "serious", more news-reporting, more of a reporter-like tone. Hall's blog is more of a hybrid between a news-blog and KSK-styled humor blog. In fact, even when Hall reports news, he does it in such a cracked-out, zany tone that it's high comedy. I highly recommend both if you're a big college football fan.
Remember you can contact TH and ask him questions about wrestling, life or anything else. Please refer to this post for contact information. He always takes questions!
