Though the Pac-12 has dismissed the possibility of further expansion in the wake of recent realignment among college football conferences—the most confusing consequence of which must be that the Big 12 now has just nine members while the Big Ten has 12—even the fact that this was discussed raises an interesting question: Is there a limit to conference size?
Having just two more members caused the Pac-12 to be divided up into two sub-conferences, so what would happen if a 16-team super-conference materialized? And what would we call that conference? Four of the current teams come from states that don’t own real estate on the Pacific; add in a couple of teams from Texas and Oklahoma and the current name loses all sense of reality. At least the teams in the soon-to-be 14-team ACC are close to the sea.
But if a conference can have 16 schools and two or more sub-conferences, why can’t it have 32? Or 64? If it makes real sense to be in a larger conference, then schools will be increasingly under pressure to join up, and conference sizes will swell. There are currently 120 NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision teams divided among 12 conferences. Setting aside the four schools that are independent, that makes an average of almost 10 teams in each. Increase the average by just six and four whole conferences will disappear.
The main reason given in deciding not to expand the Pac-12 further was, ominously, money. If the biggest obstacle is financial it implies that if or when the money is right there won’t be much in the way of the conference expanding further. As a foreigner I’ve always felt uncomfortable with this side of American sports—that teams will quite happily go where the money is, or at least where they think it is. The formerly Oakland, formerly LA, Oakland Raiders saga seemed particularly incomprehensible to me—how could a team desert its home and fans in the first place, and then expect to be welcomed back?—but it is not particularly unique. There is a fair share of U.S. professional teams that have had a few different makeovers.
College sports, though, seem more grounded in the real world. You can’t just move a university from one side of the country to another—even if Stanford does have designs for New York City—so instead we are left with the lesser evil of conference realignment. We still seem to be losing something, though. Although it would be unthinkable not to play Cal each year, Stanford’s history against USC and UCLA is surely almost as important. They have been in the same conference for over half a century. If the boot was on the other foot and the Big 12 was courting us, would we jump?
And what now happens to the much-maligned BCS ranking system? The Pac-12 now has a title game. But what if it (or one of the other conferences) decides to expand further? If a conference of 12 teams needs a title game, perhaps a conference of 24 would need a playoff system.
Every year fans feel mistreated at the end of the regular season when their school is overlooked for one of the BCS games, and there have been many unbeaten teams who never got the chance at a BCS National Championship Game. But the complexities of the BCS system are really a reflection of the nature of college football. Some teams are in conferences, some aren’t; some play more games, some play less. Judging who deserves a shot at the title when the statistics aren’t sampled evenly isn’t easy.
Perhaps realignment, though, is the answer. Should we get to eight super-conferences with their own title games, it would start to look very much like the foundations for a playoff system; just call these games the BCS Sweet 16 and the rest should fall into place nicely.
However, college football is not usually a fan of such an ordered system. The conferences would have to agree to split up the schools equally without trying to simply grab the most lucrative deals. The schools themselves would also have to work together without one going out on a limb to sign its own lucrative TV deal—yes, Texas, I’m talking to you. And someone would have to convince Notre Dame that, as Walter Payton once said, “We are stronger together than we are alone.”
Tom Taylor is trying to act like an American to avoid being deported back to the UK. Find out if he even knows what position Walter Payton played at tom “dot” taylor “at” stanford “dot” edu.