RE: A Reasonable Suggestion for a Compromise Position for Realignment
Interesting, although I question whether a larger number of losses are really a concern. With conferences having more divisions, the power schools may actually have easier schedules year-to-year compared to the old days of the round-robin. The SEC has had quite a run of undefeated or 1-loss teams over the past several years despite the claims of how tough their conference competition has been, so I don't necessarily think conference realignment is going to translate into a greater number of losses. Even if I'm wrong, though, I don't think losses in and of themselves matter as much as the impact of such losses relative to everyone else. If *everyone* in the power leagues have more losses, then I think fans will adjust their expectations. If your favorite NFL team makes it to the Super Bowl, you don't care if you had 6 or 7 losses in the regular season. Likewise, if the new "norm" for making it to the College Football Playoff regularly includes teams with 2 or 3 or more losses, then those expectations will be adjusted, as well.
That relates to one of the underpinnings of your proposal: is parity really a bad thing for college football? It certainly isn't the case in the NFL. Plus, to the extent that parity is supposedly a bad thing, college football (and basketball, for that matter) has a hedge against that since the top programs disproportionately get the top recruits every year (whereas there's a reverse order draft in the pros to prop up the talent on the worst teams). I just don't see conference realignment necessarily changing that. We've had around the same number of schools at the BCS level since 1998 (around 65 or so) and that parity hasn't ever come up (if anything, it's as concentrated at the top as ever), so I don't see how it would be different now.
At the end of the day, what purpose would those provisional members serve for the power conferences outside of the argument that they would potentially add some wins? What does having UCF or USF as provisional members do for the SEC or ACC (who already have strong Florida presences)? We could say the same for any MAC schools with respect to the Big Ten. The only place where any provisional members actually seem to add value would be if the Pac-12 and Big 12 split up some MWC schools as there are markets in that region that aren't already covered by other power conferences and would actually add new markets to those respective leagues. To me, the financial payoff for being in a power conference is much more about exclusivity as opposed to wins in and of themselves, so maintaining exclusivity (which inherently goes against the concept of provisional members) is priority #1 with that group.
If you wanted something exotic to help out the Gang of Five (and I fully admit that this is a fantasy that would never happen), then there ought to be a promotion/relegation system within that group itself. (I've seen a lot of promotion/relegation suggestions that include the power conferences, which would be even more of a non-starter.) Essentially, there should be a Gang of Five Premier League of 12, 14 or even 16 schools. The champ of the Premier League is who would get the access bowl bid in the College Football Playoff system. The rest of the Gang of Five would be split up into 4 other "leagues" based on geography. The 4 winners of those leagues would move up to the Premier League each year, while the bottom 4 of the Premier League get sent down (or maybe the bottom 2 of each Premier League division, or something to that effect... you get the idea). Like I've said, that would be impossible to implement in practicality, but it would make those games a helluva lot more fun to watch (imagine "Relegation Saturday" for college football) while the Premier League (in theory) ought to at least be somewhat competitive with the power conferences. If necessary, maybe records for the purposes of relegation or promotion can be added up over the course of 2 or 4 years to remove the prospect of extreme outlier seasons. (Like I've said, I don't think any league is going for that, but it's an idea to kick around.)
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