College Football is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
College football is broken. The conference system makes no sense with teams flying across the country to play games that feel artificial. Schedules and bowl games are uninspired. I’m not the hero you may have wanted — a non-expert sitting in my living room with opinions and a laptop during paternity leave — but I may just be the hero you need. In today’s blog, I’m taking a crack at fixing college football (with some major inspiration and help from my friend Mike who started this debate with a group email).
Learnings and Principles
Before designing a new system, it’s important to do a retrospective of what works and doesn’t work with today’s game. Here are some of the key learnings and underlying principles my friends and I have established:
1. Regional rivalries are fun and should be preserved. The current conference structure doesn’t enhance regional rivalries.
My favorite college team is West Virginia University which plays in the Big 12 conference. West Virginia is bordered by 5 states — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky. All of those states boast great college football teams that are natural regional rivalries. This was the case with Penn State in the 1980s and Pitt (located just 70 miles north of Morgantown) through much of my lifetime. But, until Cincinnati joined the Big 12 in 2023, WVU played no conference games against teams in the states surrounding it. I speak for most WVU fans when I say we don’t feel particularly jazzed to play Iowa State, the University of Houston, or BYU — even though these are all competitive teams. They’re just not schools where we have a sporting history. And, at a personal level, we’re less likely to have this mix of schools represented around a West Virginia Thanksgiving table to make them feel important.
While some conferences have maintained regional rivalries — e.g. Ohio State-Michigan in the Big 10, Auburn-Alabama in the SEC — the most recent iteration of conference realignment looks misaligned. No one should need to explain why Stanford and Cal play in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Yet we do. It’s embarrassing, and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
2. Nobody likes subjective rankings or the Selection Committee
Voting to establish team rankings for a national playoff is an exercise in futility and bruised egos. The only thing we know for certain from this process is that there will be teams and fan bases that feel like they were screwed over by an opinion-based system (e.g. the undefeated ACC champs Florida State in ‘23-’24 not making the College Football Playoff).
Although rankings have become more quantitative through the embrace of data analysis, the “best” teams chosen to compete in a national playoff are selected by a 13-member College Football Playoff Selection Committee. This group consists of one current athletic director from each of the Power Five conferences (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC) along with a mix of former coaches, players, athletic directors, administrators, and a retired member of the media. It hurts to write that, and it sounds more like politics than sports. This has to be one of the worst methodologies I could imagine. Let’s make things less subjective and get rid of voted rankings and the Committee entirely.
3. All conference, non-conference, and bowl/postseason games should be meaningful
There are too many meaningless games on schedules. For non-conference and bowl games, it’s novel to see a new opponent from time to time, but many of these games (a) aren’t particularly fun and (b) don’t have much at stake. For all the electricity of the Michigan-Appalachian State game in 2007, there are 1,000 regular season non-conference games that end up just how you’d think they would. While it’s fun for the football minnows to play in the big venues — who wouldn’t want to play at the Swamp in Gainesville or the Big House in Ann Arbor? — these teams didn’t so much earn these trips as fill a schedule opening.
Non-conference games likewise feel haphazard and a win in one of these games at best helps in the problematically subjective rankings. During bowl season, for every Fiesta Bowl there’s too many Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowls presented by Bridgestone. Even the Fiesta Bowl this year was bad football TV watching as Oregon routed Liberty, 45–6. Fans put up with it, but we don’t like it.
There’s also too many conference games that don’t mean much. It’s great when the two best teams in a conference play each other, but it’s not so fun when the bottom two teams do. But even these latter games should have something at stake so that it’s not a wasted effort. Fans want a good game and something to talk about at the tailgate, even if their teams aren’t playing for the biggest stakes in the world.
4. The US loves playoff formats
Let’s face it, we’re a country that loves a title match. It’s in our DNA. It’s also the reason the BCS bowl system didn’t really work and the country moved to the current FBS playoff format. We want certainty about our title bouts and what’s at stake. It’s fun, and let’s not lose that.
5. These are student athletes — schedules must stay limited
FBS teams have historically played 12 regular season games per year, a conference championship, and up to 2 postseason/bowl games. Of those games, about eight or nine were played against conference teams. Most national champions therefore play ~15 games total per season. These are college kids and not professionals, and they shouldn’t have to endure more games during a season, just better games. For the best prospects this also lessens the chances of injuries that could derail them before their professional careers get started. Any new system would need to stay close to this range and not expand it.
The new college football system
I’m going to start my redesign of the American college football system by doing something that might feel sacrilegious — looking to European soccer as inspiration. Once the gasps have died down, I hope you continue reading because honestly I think they’ve figured a lot of this stuff out.
How do teams in England play meaningful games in the Premier League and against other countries (e.g. Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s La Liga)? The answer: they created a domestic system of promotion/relegations and a tournament for the best teams from different country leagues to play each other (e.g. The Champions League, the Europa League) .
Alright, let’s use that as inspiration to get to my changes:
1. Re-establish regional rivalries
First, let’s create conferences that are regional and easy to understand: East, South, Central, and West. H/T to Mike who first proposed this idea. It should be that simple.
I found this map online with FBS school logos and drew hasty — but logical — regional zones on top of it. One look and it’s already better than the current conference nonsense.
Look, all the teams near each other are in the same conference! Brilliant!
2. Align team strengths within conferences and introduce promotion/relegation
Grouping all the college football teams into just 4 regional conferences immediately looks problematic. There are too many teams and not enough games for them to play each other. How will you organize conferences of dozens of teams into something comprehensible?
Mike and I agreed it was worth looking at the promotion/relegation system of European soccer for structural inspiration. Each European country has tiers of competitiveness. At the top of the English football league system is the Premier League, consisting of the 20 best teams. They include the likes of Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea. The next 24 best teams compete one tier down in the EFL Championship. Below that is EFL League One, EFL League Two… all the way down to your Sunday football leagues.
At the end of every season the best three EPL Championship teams are “promoted” to the Premier League, while the worst three Premier League teams are relegated to the EFL Championship. This ensures that all games are competitive with even the worst teams competing to ensure that they don’t drop a tier — which is disastrous for TV deal money, recruiting players, and reputation. It also ensures that teams of similar skill levels play each other in a competitive league.
This same model applies to the new UEFA Nations League where the 54 teams of Europe have been broken into 4 leagues: League A (16 teams), League B (16 teams), League C (16 teams), and League D (7 teams). Countries like France, Germany, and Italy compete in League A, while smaller soccer nations like Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Malta compete in League D. It doesn’t make sense for Italy to play Liechtenstein — we pretty much know how that will end 99 times out of 100.
Within the regional geographies, I’ve set about creating a tiered system of 8 teams per A League, B League, etc. Similar to the European soccer model, the top 2 teams from their conference league’s regular season would be relegated to the league below, while the top 2 teams from the league below would be promoted. This ensures that every college football game has something on the line–suddenly the seventh and eighth-best teams playing means something as a win can move them out of relegation. Promotion and relegation produce some of the best emotional moments and would fit well with the college football ethos.
Each league has 8 teams because that allows all teams to play each other once over 7 games. The team with the best record wins. If there’s a tie, it comes down to the head-to-head matchup between the two teams. Every league ends its conference schedule with clear placings at the end of the season.
Because seeing names is more fun, I asked Mike to figure out the top 16 teams in descending order for each regional Conference based on how they did in 2023.
Note: Mike is a huge college football fan (he has easily watched 100x more games than me) and meticulously looked at how teams finished in their current conference, playoff performance, bowl performance (if both teams were at full strength), and S&P+ score (that’s why I asked for his help and this summary doesn’t do his work justice). Per ESPN, S&P+ “a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency.” Per Mike, “S&P+ is intended to be predictive and forward-facing. It is not a résumé ranking that gives credit for big wins or particularly brave scheduling — no good predictive system is. It is simply a measure of the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football. If you’re lucky or unimpressive in a win, your rating will probably fall. If you’re strong and unlucky in a loss, it will probably rise.”
Anyway, here’s how Mike’s placings align with the regional conference design:
3. Have the top teams between conferences play each other
While it’s fun to watch the best English soccer teams play each other, sometimes you want to see how the best English teams stack up against the best Spanish, German, Italian, or French teams. UEFA has a competition called the Champions League that solves this problem. Each country — based on the strength of its domestic league — sends a set number of teams to the competition each year. A country like England sends its 4 best teams from the prior season, while a country like Portugal sends its 3 best teams.
These teams all play each other in a tournament to see how each country’s best teams stack up against each other and which team will be crowned “the champion of Europe.” This model also allows teams to win multiple trophies. For example, Manchester City won both the English league by having the most points in the regular season and the Champions League by defeating a number of rivals from other countries (e.g. Inter Milan from Italy’s Series A in the final). There is also a competition for teams that are good, but weren’t quite the best in their respective leagues — the Europa League (2nd tier) and UEFA Europa Conference League (3rd tier).
In my model, I’d take the two best teams from each conference and put them into a Champions Cup. The third and fourth placed teams would play in the Gold League, and so on (someone in marketing can come up with better names). This way, not only are the best teams competing to win their league each year, but they’re competing for the privilege to compete against other conference league teams in similar positions and win that competition. This is an extra incentive for teams to play hard — they’ll get to visit more awesome venues like the Big House, the Rose Bowl, and Death Valley based on how they do.
Here’s what that would look like with teams from the Conference design:
4. Determine a national champion with a tournament
Finally, the top team from the East, South, Central, and West conference regular season enters a four-team playoff at the end of the year. The two semifinal matchups are randomly chosen via a lottery on TV (similar to European Champions League drawings). The two winners of the games play for the National Championship while the two losers play for 3rd place.
The best season a soccer team can have in Europe is winning the Treble–their domestic league, their domestic tournament, and the Champions League. In the new college football model, only the best teams–and the ones who remain competitive year-over-year — can have a shot at the College Football Treble: (1) win the conference regular season, (2) win the Champions League, and (3) win the National Championship Playoff. Great teams will do 2 of those, but only the legendary ones will do all three. This also gives college players a reason to return for an additional year vs. go directly to the pros.
Putting theory into practice
So far everything we’ve said is theory, but what would a team’s schedule look like? And would it be better than we have now?
Overall each team needs to play 7 games against teams in its conference league and 7 games against teams in its inter-conference competition. One of those games will see a competitor that overlaps between the two (e.g. both in their conference and inter-conference competition). This is by design. This game becomes doubly important, since the ramifications affect both the conference league and the inter-conference league schedule. In this way, Michigan and Ohio State wouldn’t play each other multiple times during the year (which would dilute the rivalry), but once in a doubly important affair. We’re thus left with every team playing a combined 13 conference and non-conference games in its regular season.
For the few teams that top their conference, there is a potential 2-game playoff–semifinals and finals–for the National Championship. Therefore the max schedule is 15 games, which is with our guidelines.
Let’s take a look at what a schedule for Michigan (Mike’s favorite team) might look next year:
Michigan has the opportunity to (1) win the East Conference against other teams in its region, (2) win the Champions League against the other best teams across the country, and (3) qualify as the #1 East team for the National Tournament and win against the other Conference #1’s.
And here’s my team WVU:
We have the opportunity to (1) win the East B League against other teams in our region, (2) get promoted to the East A League by finishing in either 1st or 2nd, (3) win the Champions League B against the other similarly positioned teams across the country, and (4) win the League B National Championship.
There are no wasted games and nothing superfluous on the schedule. I challenge you to use this system for your own favorite team. I bet you’ll get a pretty fascinating and exciting schedule. Beautiful.
One last tweak–make the Copper Cup mean something
While the Champions Cup and Gold Cup feel like they’re worth playing for, why would someone care about winning the Copper Cup except for bragging rights? Here’s one last tweak: If you win the Copper Cup, you can’t be relegated — it’s like receiving the Immunity Idol in Survivor. That means that only one team in your Conference from the League below gets promoted if you win the Copper Cup. This will (a) be more fun for your fans and (b) entice fans from other colleges to root for games that they might not otherwise care about. It will be renamed the “Stay Up Cup” (once again, I need a marketer).
Are there drawbacks?
No system is perfect, they each include their drawbacks, here are some I see for this system:
Will upsets be a thing of the past?
In the new design, there are fewer mismatches between “strong” teams and “weak” teams. Those moments of an unranked underdog beating a top 5 school, rushing the field, and pulling down the goalposts will be few and far between. These are some of the best moments in college football, how could we get rid of them?! While upset games will be less likely, games with importance behind them will be more common. At the end of the season as teams win their league title, achieve promotion, avoid relegation, and win an inter-conference title will provide more potential “win” moments worth celebrating. Is it more exciting to win an upset game once every decade or have a real chance at winning something every year? I think the scale tips in favor of the new scheme.
Will this system work with the way college teams change season-over-season?
The previous season’s performance has a big impact on the current season in the new format. But, in today’s college football world, a team could remake the entire roster in one offseason with a new athletic recruits (e.g. Colorado under Deion Sanders). Similarly a successful roster from the season before might be decimated. This year’s National Championship runner-ups — the University of Washington — were 14–1 this year. In the few short weeks after the season, (1) their head coach was poached by Alabama and (2) they lost a huge number of starters and over half their back-ups to the NFL Draft or the transfer portal. In other words, they’ll look completely different.
That is all true, but I would argue that part of the reason so many athletes are leaving is because it’s not worth it to them to stay — next year they have to reboot at the expense of potential NFL dollars. The Washington scenario is what happens in today’s format. In the new design, Washington’s players have more incentive to stay since they’ll be in the Champions League next year and makes Washington an enticing destination for transfers/recruits/top talent (which is what also happens in European soccer: playing in the Champions League attracts players).
What happens if a team outside League A recruits someone who suddenly makes them a national championship contender (aka “the Cam Newton scenario”)?
This is a tough one for the proposed design. If the team is currently in League B, they couldn’t become the national champions for 2 years — first they win promotion and potentially the League B championship, then win League A and the national championship the following year. In some ways, that’s a pretty cool storyline, but it also potentially stunts this player’s ascendence.
Based on how Auburn did in 2009, they would have been in the South B League when Cam Newton became Cam Newton in 2010. So, it would have taken 2 years for Auburn to be national champions. Mike (wow this guy is helpful…) did some analysis for me. The 2010 Auburn might be the only national champion who would have been a B League team from the previous since BYU in 1984.
Another example is Vince Young whose Texas Longhorns would already have been in League A from the previous season when they became champions. There are 32 top teams in the A Leagues, and there’s only a handful of Cam Newtons in the last few decades — most of whom are likely to play for a League A college team. I think the odds are statistically in my favor, but I acknowledge the drawback.
Will Americans buy into promotion and relegation?
While promotion and relegation are foundational to organizing soccer leagues across the world, they have not been adopted in the US — including our own soccer league, the MLS. No leagues across our four major sports — NFL, NBA, MLB, or NHL — employ this concept either. Some of this is a product of TV deals and sports owners wanting to protect the value of their teams and brands. But the college game has more freedom in the spirit of competition that isn’t tied as strongly to maximizing shareholder value. And, a strong promotion-relegation system actually creates more must-watch games to keep TV deals high. Finally, I think the US’s embrace of NBC Sports’s Premier League soccer weekends, Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, and Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s FX show Welcome to Wrexham are starting to change attitudes about promotion-relegation.