What Would College Football Conferences Be Without Gerrymandering?

[BeantownKnight]

Here's a fun and interesting post I saw on the state - and shape - of football conferences. It also imagines what conferences would be like if their borders were set to retain schools in their geographic regions. Look who we get paired up with! Enjoy.

http://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2...e-football-conferences-without-gerrymandering

 

[MikeR0102]

Okay, but why 16 at 8, why not 8, 16 team conferences. Why not 10, 12 team conferences and one 8 team conference? Why? Why? Why?

 

[BuckRU]

Mostly a waste of time... thank God those 8-team conferences don't exist. Actually, the P5 conferences are better geographically than I thought, except for WVU in the Big 12.

 

[RutgersRaRa]

OP, refresh my memory here--who is Gerry and what did he do?

 

[anon_ivydyf0amkzay]

Jesus Jonathan Christ the offseason really sucks! That article is so dumb, pointless and out of touch with reality, that the author should be forced to write: "I WILL NOT PUBLISH STUPID / POINTLESS SHIT" 100 times on a chalkboard somewhere! To borrow an often used VEEP line...he went to DEFCON ****ING STUPID!

 

[GoodOl'Rutgers]

That is still gerry-mandered. The only way to go about this would be to start witht eh farthest points and work your way in.. taking say, Miami and then adding the next 7 closest chools. And Hawaii and the next 7 and so on.

examples:

Miami
Fla Atl
Fla Int
USF
UCF
Florida
Fla St.
(UGA or Troy?).. lets go UGA


Hawaii
SD State
UCLA
USC
UNLV
AZ State
Arizona
Stanford

Of course.. stuff gets difficult eventually.. you have to either start at another corner and move in.. or on the edge of an existing group and move out.

yeah.. this is tough.

 

[ecojew]

While this may be geographically rational (and I am a geographer) and serve to reduce travel costs and time, it is an irrational plan in that it combines institutions of vastly dissimilar missions and athletic philosophies into the same conference. Imagine Michigan, MSU, and ND playing road games at the directional Michigans every second year.

A better idea might be to try to improve the geographic rationality among the P5 conferences (where the institutions basically have similar athletic aspirations) and among the G5 conferences to eliminate the strange geographic outliers like WVU and Idaho.

I'm all for institutions reducing the costs of running their athletic programs but this is clearly not the way to do it. The universities, as a group, should explore other avenues, including limiting coaching contracts to 2 years across the board to eliminate the long-term payouts to fired coaches, which IMHO are a much bigger threat to the future well-being of college sports than the current geographic alignment of the 10 D1A conferences.

 

[derleider]

While this may be geographically rational (and I am a geographer) and serve to reduce travel costs and time, it is an irrational plan in that it combines institutions of vastly dissimilar missions and athletic philosophies into the same conference. Imagine Michigan, MSU, and ND playing road games at the directional Michigans every second year.

A better idea might be to try to improve the geographic rationality among the P5 conferences (where the institutions basically have similar athletic aspirations) and among the G5 conferences to eliminate the strange geographic outliers like WVU and Idaho.

I'm all for institutions reducing the costs of running their athletic programs but this is clearly not the way to do it. The universities, as a group, should explore other avenues, including limiting coaching contracts to 2 years across the board to eliminate the long-term payouts to fired coaches, which IMHO are a much bigger threat to the future well-being of college sports than the current geographic alignment of the 10 D1A conferences.

The rational plan would be to have promotion relegation. Shared TV revenue all the way across the board (with payouts based on which division you are in.

Have each division be eight 9 team divisions. Just go down through the entire NCAA football structure. With 7 hundred some football teams thats something like 6 divisions (the last one would be extra large). Eight game conference schedule, plus four teams from within your division but in another conference. Top two teams in each division make the playoffs (16 teams) and promoted (if below Division I), bottom two get relegated. Promotions and relegations are placed in the closest geographical division based on the openings left by other teams being promoted and relegated.

The big conference temas would still dominate - just like in European FB, but their fans would get great matchups every week.

Not only that, but you could do this across sports and even do away with minimum scholarship limits. So club level teams could be involved as well. It would also allow schools to invest heavily in a couple of sports without having to step everything up to D1.

Like spending teams in each sport would end up together instead of based on whether they want to play BCS FB.

Of course its radical and would never happen, but it would probably increase revenues both for the top teams (more interesting games means more TV money) and across the board (people would get somewhat acquianted with lower level teams as they cycle up and down through the divisions, and it would give people a reason to care whether an 0-11 team beats a 1-10 team.)