College Football is fundamentally broken, and a Super Conference might be the only way to fix it.
The NCAA’s recent realignments have faced backlash, with multiple giant schools switching to different conferences.
When these schools switch conferences, schedules, historic rivalries and travel are negatively affected.
A school’s schedule is based on the conference they’re in, so when realignment occurs, those big historic matchups are affected and are most likely taken off the schedule.
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Conferences aren’t even region-based anymore. USC and UCLA are set to join the Big 10 in 2024. Both are approximately 2,800 miles from Rutgers, a school they share their brand-new conference with. Having teams play on opposite coasts nearly every week is not ideal for anybody involved.
The Pac-12 and Big 12 took some massive blows when USC, UCLA, Texas and Oklahoma announced that they were leaving their respective conferences to join the Big 10 and the SEC next year. As of late, the battle of NCAA conferences has become less and less about who beats who but who represents who.
The Power 5 Conferences are becoming a thing of the past, and something needs to be done about how college football is heading.
Boise State associate athletic director Michael Walsh, proposed a 24-team conference of schools in the Western United States with three tiers. The best team in Tiers 2 and 3 moved up, while the worst in Tiers 1 and 2 moved down.
“Many, many folks are kicking around concepts of relegation/promotion, or mega-leagues,” Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez has said about Walsh’s proposal. But “this is probably the first I’ve seen of someone really putting pen to paper, and looking at it comprehensively.”
The idea is very similar to another, larger scale idea that College Football fans, experts, and talking-heads have discussed that would change the landscape of the sport forever.
Introducing the NCAA Super Conference, where the best 25 programs in College Football duke it out against each other every weekend. The Super Conference creates top 25 matchups, the most exciting of which College Football has to offer, every Saturday.
With only so many top-25 matchups happening all the time, this system rewards schools for winning while punishing the losers.
When a team doesn’t live up to expectations and finishes in the bottom five, they are relegated to the next lower conference, while the top five in the lower conference move up.
This keeps teams competing all season long, with several new schools and fanbases getting a crack at competing in the Super Conference every year. College Football has a chance to become the first American sport with promotion and relegation, which has worked overseas in soccer for over a century.
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Promotion and relegation games are the most exciting in all of soccer. The thinnest of margins can decide the future of a club; the feeling of excitement, relief, anger, and embarrassment rush through the heads of soccer fans in the final games of every season.
With College Football being such an atmospheric-based sport, promotion, and relegation games in stadiums like Death Valley would be the most electric entertainment fans could find all season, even better than the College Football Playoff and National Championship.
But what would this all mean for LSU?
Well, for starters, the Tigers could quickly go from National Champions to in the conference below in a matter of two seasons.
LSU put together arguably the greatest College Football team of all time in 2019 when it hoisted the National Championship trophy at the Superdome in New Orleans.
But following that historic run, the Tigers slumped, losing their top players from their National Championship team to the NFL Draft, going 5-5 and 6-7 over the next two seasons.
If LSU wants to stay in the National Championship conversation year in and year out, the program can’t afford more seasons like that. The Super Conference prevents programs from competing and performing under expectations.
With back-to-back lackluster seasons, the Tigers would most likely be relegated to a tier or two below, taking them out of the championship chase for the next couple of years.
But when they are eventually in the Super Conference, LSU will be hosting some of the best teams in the entire country at Death Valley every home game. No more are the guaranteed game matchups against Grambling State, Army, and Georgia State, but instead, primetime must-see TV against schools like Alabama, Georgia, and Florida State.
ESPN’s popular pregame show, College Gameday, would most likely make its first appearance in Baton Rouge since the infamous title run back in 2019.
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This attracts even more people to Death Valley and the Baton Rouge area, boosting the economy and helping the school, the city and local businesses thrive off the hottest ticket in town. But with the Super Conference, it’s not like the money would be a problem for the Tigers.
Getting these schools to agree to join the Super Conference would be easy. The TV deal this Super Conference would sign won’t just break but could shatter records.
No one is excited about splitting a cut of the Big 10’s yearly revenue with Nebraska, a school that hasn’t been ranked in the AP Top 25 since before the pandemic. However, the Super Conference structure rewards schools based on yearly performance.
For example, TCU, a smaller school that made a magical run to the National Championship Game last season, would be rewarded a more significant cut than a massive school like Alabama, a usual college football powerhouse, who had a surprisingly down season and missed the College Football Playoff in 2023.
While it may take some time, the Super Conference would be an immediate win for the NCAA. The Super Conference increases fan engagement by giving us the matchups we want, fixes the current conference realignment problem, and will bring more money into college football than you imagine.
