Power Ball: Why College Football Needs To Have Four Power Conferences

With all the expansion talk the last few months finally reaching a head this week, it now seems the college football world is in a state of full chaos and anarchy.

Nebraska set the dominoes in motion yesterday when word leaked out that the Cornhuskers will indeed be leaving the Big 12 Conference for the Big Ten.

This could very well mean it's time to start carving the tombstone for the Big 12, and we should probably start preparing ourselves for more craziness in the coming weeks. This was only the first move of many to come.

The question I pose is, why the need for so much uncertainty?

Why bother with all the talk about who's going where, and fitting there, and which conferences will survive, and so on and so on?

The landscape of the sport is very much in a shifting phase right now, but when it's all said and done, will it have shifted in a way that makes the situation a better one overall?

We all know college football has its problems, but will this move of teams and expansion of conferences actually come any closer to fixing things?

My thought here is, why speculate on what could happen when I can just state what I feel should happen?

What I feel we must do to improve college football is simple.

Regionalize it!

Break the country down into four conferences: East, West, Central, and South. Each conference has 18 teams split up into two divisions of nine. This allows for the closest thing to a playoff system while also making room for natural area-based rivalries to emerge.

When you get right down to it, college football is a fight for territory just as much as it's a fight for wins. Most teams in a given part of the country are fighting amongst each other for recruits, publicity space, and other resources as it is.

If you look back at history, you'll see that the greatest rivalries in the sport (Ohio State-Michigan, Texas-Texas A&M, Auburn-Alabama, Florida State-Miami, etc.) all involve teams within close proximity to each other. It's that neighboring backyard mentality that brews so much animosity. 

Some may say that for the most part, the sport is already regionalized, but is that really the case?

You can say that the Pac 10 consists of only teams in the West, but when you look at it closely, you have teams like Arizona and Washington separated by 1,500 miles of land. Can a true rivalry exist amongst teams so distant?

Can Florida State benefit in any way from beating a team like Boston College?

How many Massachusetts recruits do you think the Noles are making pitches to with that victory?

I believe with this type of geographical plan in place, we can break things down proportionately and open up new doors for crowning a true champion.

The NCAA has it so right when it comes to March Madness for men's basketball. That yearly bracket is one of the most exciting things in sports.

Only about eight or nine teams may have a true shot, but for most teams in the field, it's getting to the Final Four that's the real goal.

A similarly structured plan in place for football allows for the same type of excitement, only it would be spread out throughout a whole season.

Even if a team comes up short of a National Championship, they can still make the claim that they were the Kings of the South or the Beasts of the East that year, just as college basketball players have that shiny Final Four ring to show for the rest of their lives.

Here's a rough example of how alignment could look with a plan like this.

Eastern Conference

Region I

• Boston College Eagles
  
• Connecticut Huskies
• Maryland Terrapins
• Penn State Nittany Lions
• Pittsburgh Panthers
• Rutgers Scarlet Knights
• Syracuse Orange
• Temple Owls
• West Virginia Mountaineers

Region II

• Cincinnati Bearcats
• Duke Blue Devils
• Kentucky Wildcats
• Louisville Cardinals
• NC State Wolfpack
• North Carolina Tar Heels
• Virginia Cavaliers
• Virginia Tech Hokies
• Wake Forest Demon Deacons

Southern Conference

Region I

• Central Florida Knights
• Clemson Tigers
• Florida Gators
• Florida State Seminoles
• Georgia Bulldogs
• Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
• Miami Hurricanes
• South Carolina Gamecocks
• South Florida Bulls

Region II

• Alabama Crimson Tide
• Arkansas Razorbacks
• Auburn Tigers
• Baylor Bears
• LSU Tigers
• Ole Miss Rebels
• Mississippi State Bulldogs
• Tennessee Volunteers
• Vanderbilt Commodores

Central Conference

Region I

• Illinois Fighting Illini
• Indiana Hoosiers
• Michigan Wolverines
• Michigan State Spartans
• Northwestern Wildcats
• Notre Dame Fighting Irish
• Ohio State Buckeyes
• Purdue Boilermakers
• Wisconsin Badgers

Region II

• Iowa Hawkeyes
• Iowa State Cyclones
• Kansas Jayhawks
• Kansas State Wildcats
• Minnesota Golden Gophers
• Missouri Tigers
• Nebraska Cornhuskers
• Oklahoma Sooners
• Oklahoma State Cowboys

Western Conference

Region I

• Boise State Broncos
• Cal Golden Bears
• Oregon Ducks
• Oregon State Beavers
• Stanford Cardinal
• UCLA Bruins
• USC Trojans
• Washington Huskies
• Washington State Cougars

Region II

• Arizona Wildcats
• Arizona State
• BYU Cougars
• Colorado Buffaloes
• Texas Christian Horned Frogs
• Texas Longhorns
• Texas A&M Aggies
• Texas Tech Red Raiders
• Utah Utes

So how would this all work from a scheduling and structure standpoint?

The 12-game schedule would still remain.

Each team plays the eight games within their division to determine who is best. They also play two conference games against teams from the other division, and then two national games against teams from another conference.

These non division games would be useful for tie breakers and would also allow for the continuation of national rivalries (ex. USC-Notre Dame). Every team would also have one bye week during the season.

At the end of the 13-week season, the top team in Region I will play the top team in Region II for the Conference Championship during "Championship Saturday."

It would be a day of conference championship games that would look like this:

12 PM - Eastern Conference Championship
3 PM - Central Conference Championship
6 PM - Southern Conference Championship
9 PM - Western Conference Championship

It would certainly be an exciting day of college football.

The winners of the South, East, West, and Central conferences will be randomly drawn on Selection Sunday (day after Championship Saturday) to see who matches up against each other in the "Final Four."

The "Final Four" will take place on New Year's Day with the National Championship game to follow a week later.

It's a formula that somewhat resembles the March Madness bracket without directly ripping off the tournament idea.

It also doesn't mean the end of a bowl season either.

Nine teams per conference (the championship loser as well as the four top teams in each division) will be eligible for bowls.

That's 36 teams in total, enough for 18 consolation bowl games to be played in the two-week window leading up to New Years Day. That means sponsors and the majority of fan bases will still be kept happy.

As you can see, a balanced plan like this doesn't really mean a drastic shift of college football as we currently know it, it's just adding and twisting around a few elements.

Those against it might ask how a team like South Florida is going to be able to compete with a team like Florida. But when you think about it, is South Florida really at a bigger disadvantage to UF than say a team like Vanderbilt presently is in the SEC?

The only way that a school like South Florida is going to approach the program level of Florida is by beating the Gators on the field first. This plan allows for schools in a certain region (in this example, it's Florida) to battle it out on the field for supremacy.

If Florida State beats Miami or South Florida beats Florida, they can use that as a pitch to all the in state kids they recruit. They have the opportunity to make the claim that they are in fact the best team in the state and results are pretty indisputable.

And what about the other 48 schools currently in the FBS?

They would have their own subdivision. It would be similarly structured, four conferences of twelve teams split into two divisions.

There, they would battle it out for their own championship and bragging rights the same way the power conferences would only their Final Four and National Championship would take place before bowl season in early December.

In the end, this is by no means a concrete plan, it's just an idea I had that could bring some of the energy and enthusiasm of college basketball's March Madness and mesh it with college football.

You have to remember, though, that there are a lot of variables in the equation of college football and the big one is money!

Everything that happens in the major college sports such as football and men's basketball is based off the financial gain for those involved.

Don't for a second believe that college football isn't far and away a business first and a sport second.

So we'll just have to wait and how the checks fall with all this expansion stuff.

Regardless of how it ends up, it's sure to be an entertaining ride.