Even aside from the break up of rivalries, possible extra travel due to expanding your footprint and further diluting the revenue share each school gets, I don't understand why any conference would go beyond 12 teams.
The conference stops "working" and it effectively becomes two leagues. We learned from the WAC-16 that these leagues don't work. Yeah, I know part of the reason it broke up was because it was a spreadout cluster-muck of different schools with different missions and aspirations that was ultimately left out of the Cartel but there were so many issues that it didn't work at all.
With 12 teams, you can play a familiar schedule of teams every year and visit every venue of the league every four years. Rivalries develop, even with teams from the other division. Not to mention what it does to basketball.
I just don't get it, what do you think?
If you are willing to play 9 conference games, a 16-team conference with non-static divisions made up of rotating pods can accomplish the goal of visiting every league venue in four years.
Assume Pods A, B, C, and D (each with 4 teams). 9-game schedules (7 intradivisional and 2 interdivisional)
Years 1 and 2: Divisions A+B and C+D
Years 3 and 4: Divisions A+D and B+C
In all years, the interdivisional games only consist of A against C, and B against D.
So in 4 years every school has played their podmates 4 times and every other school twice.
Problems arise when conferences can't be arranged into neat little groups of 4 schools who all want to play each other twice as often as they want to play their other conferencemates. Rivalries often get in the way of neat pods.
I think the only conference where this might work in the future is in a hypothetical Pac-16. You can have a Cascadia pod, a Cali pod, a Desert/Mountain pod and a Newcomer pod.
Here's everyone trying to get into the Big12:
Louisville
Cincy
Rutgers
UConn
USF
UCF
Navy
Temple
Memphis
Houston
SMU
BSU
SDSU
AFA/Fresno
FIU
ODU
Charlotte
ECU
Marshall
UAB
USM
La Tech
Tulane
Rice
UNT
Tulsa
UTEP
UTSA
CSU
UNM
Wyoming
Hawaii
UNLV
Nevada
Fresno State/AFA
Utah State
SJSU
Arkansas State
MTSU
Troy
South Alabama
FAU
WKU
TSU
ULaLa
ULaMo
GSU
Idaho
NMSU
BYU
(07-08-2012 01:33 PM)Caltex2 Wrote: [ -> ]Even aside from the break up of rivalries, possible extra travel due to expanding your footprint and further diluting the revenue share each school gets, I don't understand why any conference would go beyond 12 teams.
The conference stops "working" and it effectively becomes two leagues. We learned from the WAC-16 that these leagues don't work. Yeah, I know part of the reason it broke up was because it was a spreadout cluster-muck of different schools with different missions and aspirations that was ultimately left out of the Cartel but there were so many issues that it didn't work at all.
With 12 teams, you can play a familiar schedule of teams every year and visit every venue of the league every four years. Rivalries develop, even with teams from the other division. Not to mention what it does to basketball.
I just don't get it, what do you think?
Depends on the 12 are and who the 14 or 16 would be. I think C-USA may be moving eventually to two more-or-less separate but pretty regional and cohesive leagues. If they pick up 2 more Mid-Atlantic FCS schools (App State, JMU, Liberty, maybe George Mason or VCU as a start-up), you'd have pretty compact 8-team divisions.
West: UTEP, UTSA, Rice, UNT, Tulsa, LT, Tulane, Southern Miss. Except for UTEP, that's practically a bus league.
East: ECU, ODU, Charlotte, Marshall, NC/VA FCS x 2, UAB, FIU. UAB and FIU as outliers, but otherwise a very travel-friendly league.
Football scheduling you play your 7 division games plus one cross-division game, for one long road trip every other year. Or two cross-division games and one long trip for a 9 game schedule.
Basketball, 7 home-and-homes for 14 games, and play half of the other division, gives you 18 conference games and only 2 cross-division trips, plus maybe the tournament.
This is all evolutionary--if you're in a spot now where the 10 or 12 teams you have don't make geographic sense, you may want to go to 14 or even 20 teams to create divisions that do make sense.
If you're not an FBS league, maybe three or four divisions could be your answer.
Until (if?) the NCAA ever sanctions conference "tournaments" where you can have 4 pod champions play in two weeks to determine a football title, going past 12 seems to be more trouble than it's worth. A 13th game would probably also work as most major schools (read: schools that have lots of seats and tickets to sell) like 7(or 8) home games, and the 9 game conference schedule with 5 road games every other year puts a crimp into the non-conference scheduling.
(07-08-2012 01:33 PM)Caltex2 Wrote: [ -> ]Even aside from the break up of rivalries, possible extra travel due to expanding your footprint and further diluting the revenue share each school gets, I don't understand why any conference would go beyond 12 teams.
The conference stops "working" and it effectively becomes two leagues. We learned from the WAC-16 that these leagues don't work. Yeah, I know part of the reason it broke up was because it was a spreadout cluster-muck of different schools with different missions and aspirations that was ultimately left out of the Cartel but there were so many issues that it didn't work at all.
With 12 teams, you can play a familiar schedule of teams every year and visit every venue of the league every four years. Rivalries develop, even with teams from the other division. Not to mention what it does to basketball.
I just don't get it, what do you think?
The WAC 16 broke up because the offered teams without any plan of who would go where. One they broke up some of the rivalries in the east to get to quads the WAC 16 was done.
More than 12 is hard to work with unless there are 9 conference games. The 6-1-1 format the SEC is trying is doomed to fail.
(07-08-2012 02:03 PM)USM@FTL Wrote: [ -> ]Here's everyone trying to get into the Big12:
Louisville
Cincy
Rutgers
UConn
USF
UCF
Navy
Temple
Memphis
Houston
SMU
BSU
SDSU
AFA/Fresno
FIU
ODU
Charlotte
ECU
Marshall
UAB
USM
La Tech
Tulane
Rice
UNT
Tulsa
UTEP
UTSA
CSU
UNM
Wyoming
Hawaii
UNLV
Nevada
Fresno State/AFA
Utah State
SJSU
Arkansas State
MTSU
Troy
South Alabama
FAU
WKU
TSU
ULaLa
ULaMo
GSU
Idaho
NMSU
BYU
I dont know what this has to do with the conversation buts its kind of funnly when you see written out like that. Most of them have little chance of being future Big-12 members.
JMO but I think it needs to be 14. Have 7 division games and 2 opposite division games. That gives each team 3 OOC games to scheduel ,I don't think we will be able to get more than 3 strong OOC opponents each . Given the outside view of our conference no one will be able to scheduel a division 1AA team. We have to make every game count ,more so than the other conferences . Despite how we feel about them ,we are preceived as number six.
(07-08-2012 02:33 PM)FUB Wrote: [ -> ]JMO but I think it needs to be 14. Have 7 division games and 2 opposite division games. That gives each team 3 OOC games to scheduel ,I don't think we will be able to get more than 3 strong OOC opponents each . Given the outside view of our conference no one will be able to scheduel a division 1AA team. We have to make every game count ,more so than the other conferences . Despite how we feel about them ,we are preceived as number six.
If you have 14 teams, with a 9 game conference schedule, then you play 6 division games, not 7.
This is what Syracuse's schedule will look like in 2013.
Out of Conference
@Northwestern
Penn State
FCS Team (Not yet scheduled)
Division
Boston College
Clemson
Florida State
Maryland
NC State
Wake Forest
Cross division
Pitt (Permanent Cross-Division Rival)
VT/UVA/Miami
GT/UNC/Duke
6 in division games. 1 permanent cross-division game. Rotate the other 2 games, through the remaining six.
(07-08-2012 02:44 PM)OrangeCrush22 Wrote: [ -> ] (07-08-2012 02:33 PM)FUB Wrote: [ -> ]JMO but I think it needs to be 14. Have 7 division games and 2 opposite division games. That gives each team 3 OOC games to scheduel ,I don't think we will be able to get more than 3 strong OOC opponents each . Given the outside view of our conference no one will be able to scheduel a division 1AA team. We have to make every game count ,more so than the other conferences . Despite how we feel about them ,we are preceived as number six.
If you have 14 teams then you play 6 division games, not 7.
This is what Syracuse's schedule will look like in 2013.
Out of Conference
@Northwestern
Penn State
FCS Team (Not yet scheduled)
Division
Boston College
Clemson
Florida State
Maryland
NC State
Wake Forest
Cross division
Pitt (Permanent Cross-Division Rival)
VT/UVA/Miami
GT/UNC/Duke
6 in division games. 1 permanent cross-division game. Rotate the other 2 games, through the remaining six.
You can play 7 you play everyone in division and 2 out .That is 9 ,with 3 more OOC that is a total of 12. As far as I know you are not required to only play 6,or scheduel a division 1AA school. Why do you need 3 opposite division games if you round robin your division then there is no doubt about who is division champs for the CCG
I can see 16 teams working.
The ACC I think will be the first to move to 16 by adding UConn and Rutgers. Then you'll see them move to a north-south alignment, with the following alignment:
North: Boston College, Connecticut, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Maryland, Virginia, Virginia Tech
South: North Carolina, North Carolina St., Duke, Wake Forest, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Florida, Miami
The PAC-12 will only move to 16 if they get somebody big out of the deal: namely Texas & Oklahoma. They'll expand to 16 to get those two and basically shore up the Western area. I think this is a real distinct possibility in the future, but Texas would need to jetison the Longhorn Network contract, and then the PAC-12 would launch PAC-16 Texas network covering both Texas and Texas Tech to replace it.
West: Washington, Washington St., Oregon, Oregon St., Stanford, California, USC, UCLA
East: Arizona, Arizona St., Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St., Texas, Texas Tech.
The Big Ten will expand if Notre Dame is in the mix. Other than Notre Dame, though, they're running out of options. They'd either need to raid the Big-12 and take Kansas, or they'd need to raid the Big East to take Louisville, or the ACC to get to the eastern Seaboard. I would have put Missouri in there as a definent candidate before Missouri went to the SEC.
The Big-12 won't expand to 16, they're having enough trouble to get to 12. Again, the problem is who do they take? After Louisville, and BYU, their options are getting pretty slim. Maybe Cincinnati, but who knows.
The SEC would have to raid the Big East (Louisville, Cincinnati maybe) or ACC to get to 16.
Never mind I am thinking of 16 teams you are right sorry.
I agree. 12 is far better than 14 or 16. IMO anything beyond 12 is inherently unstable. It gets harder to reach a consensus and its harder to get like schools. You lose cohesiveness because you don't play teams in the other division as often in football. I don't think there is any example of a stable conference of more than 12 teams.
16 is really just 2 leagues united by a TV contract unless you do quads, when it is 4 leagues united by a TV contract-even worse. And I haven't heard an idea in college football I like less than having 4 team quads with semi-finals. You make the best team win twice and will always have 1 or 2 teams who have no business playing for the league championship since they only have to beat 3 other teams.
People keep suggesting quads, but seem to forget the WAC gave up on it after 3 years because it confused fans. Same thing with the weird divisions like the ACC. Who remembers who is in which division? I'd bet half the players couldn't tell you. Divisions should be simple and you should play everyone in the league frequently.
(07-08-2012 02:23 PM)Gamecock Wrote: [ -> ]More than 12 is hard to work with unless there are 9 conference games. The 6-1-1 format the SEC trying is doomed to fail.
Agree. I think that loss of cross division games and the extra emphasis on SOS in the new format will require us to go to 9 conference games (6-1-2).
I would also make it a sequential rotation where instead of home and away for the rotataing other division, you go all the way through and back again like this
(hypothetical A&M vs SEC East, A&M vs USC is permanent rivalry played every year)
2013
-@Florida
-Missouri
2014
-@Kentucky
-Tennessee
2015
-@Vanderbilt
-Georgia
in 3 years (rather than 6) you have played everyone in the opposite division (and every player gets a chance to play all the teams in the league) and then it simply starts over but flips venues:
2016
-Florida
-@Missouri
etc
Wouldn't surprise me if the SEC starts pushing for an NCAA rule change increasing the number of FBS regular-season games to 13, so they can play 9 conference games without having to give up their 4 non-con games.
Wow, that would either mean there would be no bye week during the season or they push the season further into December and that's not counting the fact that we've just begun to add a playoffs to FBS. That's gonna be brutal to the players.
(07-08-2012 03:17 PM)10thMountain Wrote: [ -> ] (07-08-2012 02:23 PM)Gamecock Wrote: [ -> ]More than 12 is hard to work with unless there are 9 conference games. The 6-1-1 format the SEC trying is doomed to fail.
Agree. I think that loss of cross division games and the extra emphasis on SOS in the new format will require us to go to 9 conference games (6-1-2).
I would also make it a sequential rotation where instead of home and away for the rotataing other division, you go all the way through and back again like this
(hypothetical A&M vs SEC East, A&M vs USC is permanent rivalry played every year)
2013
-@Florida
-Missouri
2014
-@Kentucky
-Tennessee
2015
-@Vanderbilt
-Georgia
in 3 years (rather than 6) you have played everyone in the opposite division (and every player gets a chance to play all the teams in the league) and then it simply starts over but flips venues:
2016
-Florida
-@Missouri
etc
Definitely agree with you. I also really like the idea of playing teams for just one year rather than doing home and homes. That way players get to play everyone in the other division at least once in their career.
(07-08-2012 04:23 PM)Wedge Wrote: [ -> ]Wouldn't surprise me if the SEC starts pushing for an NCAA rule change increasing the number of FBS regular-season games to 13, so they can play 9 conference games without having to give up their 4 non-con games.
Not out of the question, but it could be difficult. 13 games plus a conference championship and potentially two playoff games is 16 games. What if they expand the playoff to 8 teams? At a certain point it is too much.
I only see 13 games happening IF the unlikely event of 16 team super conferences happens to accommodate conference semi-final and championship games.