What Would College Football Look Like With Promotion and Relegation?
Last week, I wrote that blog about college football being "more serious than ever" about moving to a 24-team playoff. With all due respect to myself, it was a lousy blog.
For one, what does that even mean? – "more serious than ever". Of course they're more serious now than back when we were voting an undefeated Florida State out of the playoff due to injury. We all know the playoff will eventually expand to at least 24 teams. It's a matter of when, not if.
For two, at the end of the blog, I put together a hypothetical of, "What would college football look like if structured the same way as European soccer?"
I love that hypothetical. I love any hypothetical involving league structure and playoff scenarios. Specifically, I love coming up with ways to incorporate promotion/relegation into any sport. It's the one great thing soccer has going for it that we just don't have here in the United States. Even though we almost certainly never will, I like imagining ways in which it could happen. It's like doing a puzzle. If college football wanted to implement a promotion/relegation system within each conference, what would it look like?
For my last blog, I put something together, but I rushed it. It was littered with errors. I effectively finished 90% of the puzzle, the fun part, then crammed in the final pieces so I could move on to something else.
At that point, what I should have done was chalk it up as an L and move on to something else. Instead, I got back in the lab (i.e., PowerPoint) to correct my mistakes. I took things even further. I created a college football world with promotion/relegation and postseason tournaments featuring 6 to 8 groups of round robin play that lead into an 8-team single-elimination playoff. I created scenarios for both a 24-team and a 32-team playoff. I even made consolation tournaments for teams that didn't qualify for the big one. I put it all together in a way I thought was digestible, then tweeted it out.
It received a remarkable lack of engagement. Almost an impossible amount. Typically you can tweet the word "college football" and fall backward into at least 20 likes. It was the worst effort-to-engagement ratio by a Barstool employee since Les Mascots. And much like Les Mascots, I will continue imposing my work on you until somebody tells me, "Sure, John... I guess that's kind of interesting to think about.", or I spend so much time on this instead of writing blogs that people will actually click on that I get myself fired.
Here is what things would look like with a 24-team playoff. These are hypothetical end-of-season conference standings. The top division in each conference (Division 1, the promoted division) plays a single round robin with the bottom two finishers playing a relegation game (loser to Division 2 next season). Division 2 plays a double round-robin, with the top two finishers playing a promotion game (winner to Division 1 next season).
The final playoff spot is determined by a wild card game between the AAC & PAC-12 runners-up.
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The College Football Playoff will be 6 groups of 4 teams. Each group plays a single round robin; winners advance. The two second-place teams with the best records earn a wild card bid to the single-elimination playoff (wild card tiebreaker is highest national ranking).
Here's what things would look like with a 32-team playoff. Same round robin schedules and promotion/relegation rules apply. In this scenario, wild-card play-in games will be ACC #6 vs. Big 12 #6 and B1G #7 vs. SEC #7.
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Naturally, the teams who don't qualify for the official College Football Playoff will play in a lesser, consolation tournament. Don't ask me how we'll convince some of these SEC teams to participate. It might have to be at gunpoint.
A thousand apologies, but I had to squeeze at least one more blog out of this. All things considered, this entirely fictional world I've created is still more real than the one some of college football's current AP voters (Greg Luca) live in. Boom, roasted.
Giphy Images.