SMQ: Thinking radically about college football realignment in age of coronavirus

When we think about realignment in college football, bigger is usually considered better. In the age of coronavirus, we should start thinking smaller.

For the longest time in college football history, conferences were aligned in geographic configurations. The Big Ten first formed as a union of schools throughout the Midwest, and the Intercollegiate Football Association banded together the original football powerhouses of the northeast that now comprise the Ivy League. Realignment, when it did happen, maintained this compact alignment.

Other than Arkansas, the Southwest Conference was defined by its deeply Texan roots. The Big Eight was the conference of the Great Plains. The Pac-8 (prior to landing the Arizona schools in the late 1970s) was, well… Pacific based, with inland Washington State the furthest school from the ocean. Even when the SEC expanded in 1992, it incorporated contiguous programs in Arkansas and South Carolina.

Then television revenue became the driving force of conference alignment. Coupled with a loophole that allowed championship games for conferences with 12 or more teams, realignment increasingly focused less on geographically aligned fits than with landing more TV viewers within the conference footprint.

Now we are locked in a world where the Big 12 stretches from West Texas to West Virginia, where the Atlantic Coast Conference stretches all the way inland to Louisville, and where the Pac-12 incorporates Rocky Mountain schools in Utah and Colorado.

In the age of coronavirus, people are starting to imagine new ways to engineer a realignment that allows for football to continue in the midst of a pandemic. Most of these concepts, however, retain a mindset that bigger is better. One dozen remains the prevalent idea of what constitutes ideal conference size.

That is probably an erroneous way to look at conference alignment. To really provide flexibility, we need to think smaller.

This week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback thought experiment realigns the national college football landscape into 16 distinct regional conferences of eight teams each. In looking at the 130-team FBS, this required dropping two teams off the list. Sorry, Hawaii and Liberty fans, but somebody had to get the axe and yours were the two teams that lost out in the end.

Some conferences are understandably stronger than others. This is due to retaining as much geographic compactness as possible. Even given those disparities, this setup allows for a true 16-team playoff to blossom in a truly national format, with the champions of each loop meeting in a four-round bracket.

Let’s look at each conference and imagine how things might play out in these leagues in 2020 before breaking down a theoretical 16-team national playoff.