Yay or Nay on Promotion/Relegation within the G5?
Everyone focuses on what the G5's don't have, let's focus for a minute on what they do have:
-An automatic bid to a New Year's Six bowl game
-$90+ million in annual College Football Playoff Revenue
Now, if that was split among a single conference instead of 60+ teams, you know what that looks like? A Power Conference.
If the G5s would start thinking bigger than their measly $1.5 million per team payout, they could use their autonomy to create a sixth football-only Power Conference and the P5's couldn't do a thing about it. And here's how they could do it:
-5 G5 football-only conferences (1 Premier, 4 regional West/Central/North/South)
-NY6 Bid goes to Premier Conference winner
-CFP money is divided among Premier Conference members only
-TV deal is negotiated for Premier Conference (The Big East was offered $100 million/yr before it fell apart, this conference could likely get something similar, especially with a Championship game)
-The regional conferences negotiate their TV deals as a whole (big value in each regional championship game being a play-in game for Premier conference membership)
-Premier Conference membership can fluctuate between 9 and 18 depending on the number of schools that qualify
-Teams with a 5 year average Sagarin rating in the top half of CFB (Top 65, with lowest rating dropped allowing for the occasional down year) AND that average 30k+ in attendance (TV money only comes if members actually have fan bases) earn a spot in the premiere conference
-Regional conference champions are admitted to the premier conference for the following season
-By eliminating bad teams from the Premier conference, the champ actually has an outside shot at the CFP due to the boost to SOS
-All other sports go to traditional regional conferences that actually make sense and minimize travel costs (Tulsa & UConn in the same basketball conference? Nope.)
The G5's could do all of this without needing anything from the P5's, but it would involve sacrifice and investment in their own programs, which too many aren't willing to do. Given the criteria, a Year 1 version of the conference would look something like this:
UCF, USF, Navy, Houston, Memphis, Temple, BYU, Boise St, San Diego St, Cincinnati
With several schools close to qualifying (Fresno St, Marshall, App State, Air Force, Colorado St, Southern Miss, etc.)
So is this something you would be in favor of?
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