Maryland & Rutgers to the Big Ten. Notre Dame to the ACC. A&M and Missouri to the SEC. I'm still waiting to hear that Hawaii is now in the Big East! There's chaos everywhere!
The rise of the super-conference is ruining college athletics. Good luck catching a road game if you're a Boise State student. How interesting does that Minnesota-Rutgers rivalry sound to you? Hell, NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA divisions are more concentrated than these super-conferences.
What if we started all over, from scratch? Tear down every conference and start over, but this time the focus is on regions. No super-conferences, no cable networks, no TV markets, and absolutely no BCS. Open up college football so that some of the smaller schools, many who were powerhouses back in the day, can afford to compete again. Create intense rivalries between schools that are 100 miles away instead of 1000. Make it so that fans can actually afford to go see their teams play on the road. What if?
Well, in the spirit of What If Sports, and thanks to the flu that has kept me in bed for the past few days, I've created 22 DI conferences based on regional proximity. 12 team conferences, two divisions, one conference championship game at the end of the season. Win your conference and you earn a trip to the national tournament. There are no steadfast rules to qualifying for a DI conference except that you have to be able to field teams in the major sports. Since football is the most difficult team to field, I'll use that as the measuring stick (assumption being that if they can put a football team out there, they can also do basketball, baseball/softball, etc) Enrollment, location, tradition, previous conference affiliation are all taken on a case by case basis. I'll post a new conference every day or so as time permits me. Feel free to join in the discussion. I'll post the first conference shortly.
11/29/2012 12:34 AM (edited)