(01-04-2014 12:58 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(01-03-2014 04:56 PM)TexanMark Wrote:  

(01-03-2014 04:54 PM)FloridaJag Wrote:  

(01-03-2014 03:04 PM)Wilkie01 Wrote:  

(01-02-2014 01:17 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  I'll point this out again:

1998 (1st year of the BCS) - 63 schools in 6 power conferences plus ND
2014 (1st year of the CFP) - 65 schools in 5 power conferences plus ND

That's a net change of 2 schools in 16 years. The more things change, the more things change the same. Realignment has shown that there will not be another entire league elevated to the power conference level. Any league with too many "new school" teams will get relegated (i.e. the Old Big East/American) - if anything, realignment has simply restored the "old school order" of 1998 with a small number of promotions of individual schools. As a result, hat's much more likely is that a very small handful of schools (2 to 4) will get promoted to the power conferences, just as we've seen in the last 16 years. The power leagues are only very mildly interested in that small handful of schools as it is, so they certainly aren't interested in promoting 10, 12 or 14 of them at one time.

Louisville, Utah, and TCU were not in the 1998 group but they are aii in the P5 now.

Does that mean that SMU is the only school that has not made it back to a "Power" conference?

Houston too.

Rice, Houston and SMU from the old SWC are still on the outside.

Temple was also demoted, although that happened due to factors outside of conference realignment.

Rice, Houston and SMU were cutoff from the SWC in 1996.

Back in the early 90's everybody in FBS was considered major college football with the exception of the MAC which was considered a tweener FBS/FCS league.

The WAC was considered a big with BYU and Air Force leading the way along with Eastern and Southern Independents. When the whole BCS system came into being and having the WAC left behind that was very controversial because that was a big geographical area to ignore.