Which Schools MUST Stay Together?
The Ideal Conference Draft has sparked some thoughts:
1. Where are lines drawn when a school is so wildly valuable that geography, culture, academics, and/or athletics are tossed to the wayside to partner with them?
2. On the flip side, where are the lines drawn when a school is so wildly a match in geography, culture, academics, and/or athletics that a major blemish or two is overlooked to partner with them?
3. Regardless of all the circumstances swirling about, are there a handful of core groupings that absolutely should and must stay together?
We see items 1 and 2 play out in the real world. Notre Dame and Texas are perhaps the best examples of the 1st, and the recent additions of Colorado, Rutgers, and, to a degree, Maryland are decent representations of the 2nd. Those two thoughts could be debated ad nauseam with every school.
The third question does interest me, though, and I'd like to toss it out to group-think. Stripping history and current conference affiliations aside, below are some groupings that I feel should absolutely stay together, come hell or high water.
Washington, Oregon, California, UCLA (this is a good example... for instance, I could see Stanford conceivably joining a private school conference with USC, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Syracuse, Vanderbilt, Duke, Miami, Boston College, and maybe BYU, Baylor, and/or TCU. Stanford would not pass the "come hell or high water" requirement for the UW/UO/Cal/UCLA grouping, in my opinion)
Stanford, USC
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois
Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State
Georgia, Florida, Auburn, Tennessee
North Carolina, Virginia, Duke
This exercise is by no means a determination of value... some schools are transitional locations and can fit in any number of groupings (Penn State, Missouri, and Kansas come to mind). First of all, are these "hell or high water" groupings accurate? If so, are there any schools that should have been included in one of them, or is there yet another grouping at the FBS level that was missed? Once those are confirmed, I would be interested in using these groupings to build truly ideal conference setups in a group-think manner and see what we discover. It is good that we have some regular folks on here from outside the southeast to lend some perspective.
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