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

Examining the potential 2020 playoff structure

What this realignment does by design is create clearly defined geographic regions once again at the top level of the sport. The eight-team structures in each conference allow for true seven-game round-robin schedules that eliminate the need for a conference championship game.

It wouldn’t be necessary if there was a concrete framework for launching a marquee 16-team national championship tournament. The champion from each region would automatically advance to the four-round playoff, with the first three rounds played at the home site of the higher-ranked team by a combination of winning percentage, aggregate human and computer rankings, and conference strength. Make the championship game the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, every year, and set aside the tomfoolery of imagining a better venue for crowning the best team in the land.

Even if you factor in four games for the national champion and the losing finalist, a playoff can still be fit into the month of December once conference title games are cut from the schedule. The seven-game conference schedule will be combined with a reversion back to 11-game schedules that conclude on Thanksgiving weekend. That allows for the continuation of traditional conference rivalries and perhaps the stipulation to restrict conference travel between contiguous regions.

That would allow Oregon and USC to play in the regular season, for instance, or Oklahoma and Nebraska to duel against one another. It would mean the end of the USC-Notre Dame regular season series, unless special stipulations were put in place for historic rivalries, but that could certainly be worked out with four non-conference opportunities on the table.

An 11-game schedule also allows greater flexibility — for pandemics, yes, but also for rescheduling games impacted by natural disasters. Such flexibility might have allowed UCF to play games against Power Five opponents in recent campaigns that were canceled due to hurricanes. It also limits the impact on young bodies that are receiving no direct payment for their physical labor.

That would allow for comparisons between conferences that help determine home-field advantage in the playoffs, though brackets will be arranged not on a 1-16 basis but rather around regional funneling.

The first quarter corresponds to the far western parts of the country. The top part of the quarter involves the northern stretches, with teams stretching from the Pacific Northwest through the Great Plains. The bottom half of the quarter encompasses the southern regions of the west, from the Bay Area through Southern California all the way eastward into West Texas.

The second quarter involves two main sections. The top part of this quarter involves the 10 Texas teams not included in the Desert Conference and their conference members in Oklahoma and Louisiana respectively. The champion of that region advances to play the winner of the lands stretching along the Mississippi River from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

The third quarter is the northeastern stretches of the country throughout the Great Lakes region and into New England and the mid-Atlantic states. The top part of this third quarter effectively resembles the Big Ten championship of the prior era. On the other side of this quarter, the two leagues of Lambert Trophy lore duel for the spoils.

In the final quarter we get the southeastern champion. The Deep South and Florida Conferences encompass the heartland of SEC country. The Tennessee Valley and Atlantic Conferences stretch through more SEC country as well as the traditional heartland of the ACC.

Here’s how it might look using projections from the previous slides:

Looking at most of these games on paper, it is hard to find any real duds in the bunch. By the second round, at least, we find some real powerhouse matchups. Even in the round of 16, there are only a few games that tilt significantly in favor of one team over the other.

The bracket could play out any number of ways, but imagine those Round of 16 matchups on the first weekend of December:

• Iowa State facing Oregon in the raucous environs of Autzen Stadium
• Arizona State going to the Coliseum to take on USC for the right to play winner of Ducks/Cyclones
• Oklahoma going to Baton Rouge for a night game in Death Valley
• Ole Miss hosting Kentucky after a day of tailgating on the Grove to see who faces winner of Sooners/Tigers
• Wisconsin and Ohio State dueling at the Horseshoe for Midwestern supremacy
• Penn State hosting Boston College in Happy Valley for the Lambert and the chance to take on the Badgers or the Buckeyes
• Tennessee traveling to Death Valley… or perhaps even hosting Clemson at Neyland Stadium?
• Alabama inviting Florida to Tuscaloosa for a showdown reminiscent of the first SEC championship game and the chance to take on Vols or Tigers in the next round

Would you want to miss any one of those December 5 contests? I would certainly welcome them as the ultimate birthday present.

Then go ahead and imagine what the next round might look like over the weekend of December 12. USC headed to Autzen or the Ducks traveling to Los Angeles. Oklahoma hosting Kentucky in Norman. Ohio State and Penn State in front of more than 100,000 screaming fans, regardless of whether the game is held in Columbus or State College. Clemson battling Alabama at Bryant-Denny Stadium in front of another massive crowd.

Then semifinals could be held on finals week at two lucky campuses. Imagine what it would be like to see Oklahoma return to Autzen Stadium for the first time since their controversial 34-33 loss in 2006, and watching Ohio State (or perhaps Penn State depending on who had home-field advantage in their quarterfinal matchup) heading south to Alabama to take on the Tide in front of a partisan crowd in Tuscaloosa.

Then teams get off a week for the holidays before heading west to Pasadena for the lead-up to the big game. Allow losing semifinalists to square off in a rotation of the following sites: the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona, the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, the Cotton Bowl in Arlington, and the Sun Bowl in El Paso. Maintain those sites annually for losing semifinalists and quarterfinalists and the fallen from the Round of 16 to have one last chance at glory against one another, again on a regional basis:

• Sugar: Oklahoma vs. Ohio State (losing semifinalists)
• Fiesta: USC vs. Kentucky (losing quarterfinalists)
• Orange: Penn State vs. Clemson (losing quarterfinalists)
• Sun: Iowa State vs. Arizona State (lost in Round of 16/Quarter 1)
• Cotton: LSU vs. Ole Miss (lost in Round of 16/Quarter 2)
• Citrus: Wisconsin vs. Boston College (lost in Round of 16/Quarter 3)
• Peach: Florida vs. Tennessee (lost in Round of 16/Quarter 4)

Again, you’d happily watch any number of those games. We could also have eight other bowl games to match up second-place teams from each of the 16 conferences, if the bowl structure must be maintained to milk the programming boon that is college football as much as possible.

In the end, though, the star would be the playoff… and that is okay. We have already seen the shine of the spotlight focus around creating a single national championship game, from the early efforts of the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance to the 16-year run of the Bowl Championship Series from 1998 through the 2013 season.

Now that we are more than five years into the College Football Playoff and its four-team structure, we can see clearly that such a structure is at once more expansive and yet as exclusionary as ever. Without real regionality considered in the mix, the national championship is no more legitimate for the addition of two more teams.

Even an eight-team structure encompassing the current structure of the FBS level — where Power Five champions get an automatic bid while the Group of Five champs peck each other’s eyes out hoping to land one automatic bid between them — cannot really allow every storyline to shine from the regular season.

In the age of coronavirus, we are finding that our exploits must remain much closer to home. That ought to be true of our football as well, for in such a structure we acknowledge the uneven nature of American regionality and the uneven nature of viral outbreaks. We build more slack into the structure while allowing more slack for the bodies that entertain us every Saturday.

In the process we also acknowledge that these athletes are overworked and undercompensated. This system provides an outlet to fully capitalize on name, image, and likeness rights that are coming down the pipeline at the state level across the country. It also provides both a reduction in the demands on these athletes’ bodies while providing them with a real chance to play for a national championship no matter where an elite talent elects to go to school.

That can allow football to blossom more fully across the country, if that is indeed what we want to have happen. But no matter what happens down the line, the buzzword when it comes to realignment ought not be bigger but rather smaller.