Power Five Autonomy; Will FBS Split Into Two Divisions?
The NCAA Board voted Thursday to allow the 65 schools in the five power conferences to write many of their own rules, allowing the conferences to make decisions on issues such as stipends, benefits, staff sizes, and recruiting rules. See the ESPN Report here.
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So what does this mean for college football as a whole?
Well, with more support growing among Power Five coaches to only play other Power Five Schools, the WAC, MAC, Conference USA, American Athletic Conference, and Sun Belt will all but have become another division in college football. It’s clear that conferences like the SEC, which threatened to break off from the NCAA without such autonomy, wear the pants in the relationship with the NCAA.
It’s a mixed bag on whether or not this is a good thing. With 65 teams in the power conferences, that’s about as many teams as you would expect to be in the upper-echelon of college football anyway before teams began to be added to it at a rapid pace in the 1990s and 2000s.
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As more teams continue to get added, the sport continues to get watered down. It’s clear the bottom of college football is so far below the top.
However, with a playoff coming, how watered down could that be now with only 65 teams? a Four-team playoff among 128 teams made college football seem more elite in a weird way. I’m not sure that’ll be the case with 128 teams. And there are plenty of exciting teams to mask the overwhelmingly awful teams in the other conferences, including many AAC teams in addition to teams like Boise State.
Perhaps there should be a system based on merit, where if you perform at a certain level you’ll be allowed to move into one of those Power Five conferences.
Those conferences will continue to have expansion on their minds no matter what, so it’s not a crazy theory.