(09-16-2021 09:30 PM)ken d Wrote: ....why would P5 schools (and their fans) have any interest in it?
For them the only benefits of having a G5 (or 4) are to give P5 schools 7 home games and get more P5 schools bowl eligible.
I think that point often gets lost in these kinds of discussions.
It's simultaneously the most obvious reason why the occasional idea floated that the autonomous schools/conferences will eventually kill off any non-auto schools/conferences is ill-conceived.
The Minnesotas, the North Carolinas, the Washingtons, the Tennessees.... those schools that can have really good years and also can have very mediocre if not bad years... which in fact is most of the big money schools...
need the benefit of a game or two every season in which they have some plausible advantage to add to their win column instead of their loss column... it's about bowl eligibility, but even if it weren't, it still would be about having a winning record and avoid the reputation of being a perennial loser.
But having said that, 20 years ago there was not even any talk of including non-auto schools in any major bowl... and to imagine a playoff format that might evolve to include even just one non-auto school would have received gut-busting laughter.
The point being, like it or not, the non-autos have been able to make some serious progress of-late compared to the state of things not so long ago. The talent inventory itself, and the capacity of the NFL to scout even tiny schools, and as much as anything, the proliferation of televised games through streaming in addition to broadcast, have all combined to force that evolution, I believe.
And circling back to a major premise of this thread, the time is now ripe for the non-autos to begin working off-the-field-of-play from a spirit of cooperation and what's-best-for-the-whole rather than from a spirit of dog-eat-dog me-first competition.
For instance, why even do the TV contract negotiation thing separately? Sure, there's some difference to TV people between a game featuring a Boise State versus a Ball State, but any group of competitive teams naturally benefits from having a few at the top that represent Goliaths... and the common analogy of big fish/smaller pond vs smaller fish/big pond thing applies.
It makes sense for the non-auto conferences and their schools to collaborate on a TV deal for all. Boise, in particular, could benefit from a package that is national in its constitution, in which it would be one of the regularly featured schools not unlike the New England Patriots have been at the pro level.