Between NIL money, the transfer portal, and the reshuffling of divisions, the old College Football era has ended and needs restructuring.
The Current divisions are useless. The Big10 has 13 teams now including several on the west coast. The Pac12 only has two teams in it because everyone else has left for other divisions. The ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference) has teams in Texas and California. And with the proliferation of the College Football Playoffs, the bowl games have lost their prestige. It seems schools can just decide they want to play in a different division and move.
All to say, the soul of College Football is gone. And it is time to do something about it.
I propose dividing the 136 teams into 4 separate leagues. And structuring them like the English Premier League, The Champions League, League One, League Two (Obviously need to workshop new names) Each season, the bottom 3 teams of each league get relegated to the league below, while the top 3 teams are promoted to the league above. Instead of schools switching divisions just because they want to play against more competitive teams, they have to earn it.
I think that this would create more competition among the vast majority of schools that don't have a chance to make the playoffs necessarily. But are fighting for a chance at promotion, and that would make fans/alumni more enthusiastic, now ALL teams have something to play for.
College football does already have 4 levels. Div 3, Div 2, Div 1 FCS and Div 1 FBS. Now the reason why they don't do relegation like the English league is frankly not all schools have the same resources and they aren't just going to suddenly be able to find the money if they have a few good seasons in a row. The best team in Div 3 football is North Central College (IL) it is a tiny school that frankly isn't not well suited to move up if they had a few good seasons in row were forced to move from Div 3 to Div 2 to FCS to FBS that would do major harm to schools financial position because they don't have the money to compete at that level. College sports aren't independent companies that are focused solely on the sport they are part of the schools which complicates things.
In a relegation pyramid lower levels don’t have the same resources either. That’s why they are at the bottom.
College football doesn’t want to pay its employees.
They already are paying now
they sued for every dime they got. This isn’t the NCAA being good guys and thinking they deserve this pay. They forced this money through a judge.
Because of that, do you really think NCAA is giving them a fair share?
Thanks to you cuck fans, they have to sue to get their fair share. And they have a long way to go.
The English football league is exactly the same. Bottom tier teams have less resources than top tier teams. Your argument doesn’t really make sense. When within premier league the bottom 5 generally have significantly less resources. It still all works much better than current system of reporters ranking teams.
Does it work better? This century there’s been 6 Prem champions and 13 college football champions
Doesn’t work better than the American sports model either.
12 - NBA
13 - NFL
14 - NHL
16 - MLB
I mean that's kind of the point. If they have a great run and get promoted they will get a lot more income because people will be excited and go to games and buy merch and they will get shared revenue from more televised and big national games.
That will help their program grow maybe not enough to stay up maybe they'll get relegated that next year or the year after but they still got that extra income while they were up and if they invest it wisely it can help build up the program so next time they go on a good bun they stay for a couple more years and eventually build up a bigger program.
I think all American sports should have relegation and promotion how exciting would it be to go to your local AA baseball team and no they have possibility to become AAA or even make the majors
I’m talking about just D1 FBS.
yeah no disrespect to the lower divisions, but all CFB talk is only related to D1 football.
FCS is also D1
ok? Like I said D1 is what people talk about not 2 or 3.
CFB sub people briefly mention FCS as well, or at least flair themselves with it but I’ve never seen a D2/3 flair for example
I see D2 and D3 flair all the time. You probably overlook it, but if you know some of the schools you will notice.
I have seen a couple Linfield Wildcats flairs there, that’s a D3 school.
NDSU, as an FCS school, would beat a third of, if not closer to half of, teams in the FBS and yet they are still FCS
I mean in England a team at step 7 could theoretically make the premier league after 11 seasons, in order for it to work properly though it would have to go down to D3. Personally I think promotion/relegation would be better than the system we have now.
Get your point but those levels dont really work like promotion and relegation the money gap is massive and schools cant just move up on vibes a few good seasons wont fix budgets travel or facilities I think the idea is fun but college football is tied to schools not clubs so it gets messy fast
The reason why relegation shouldn't happen in college sports is because it creates inherent financial instability. If a team gets relegated that's a lot less revenue for the school, and schools absolutely will spend money in what might be an unsuccessful attempt to achieve promotion.
That's fine for professional teams but for universities who are supposed to be institutions of learning first and foremost, spending more money on their football programs could lead to cuts in other parts of the school should their program suffer relegation or even just poor management. So pro/rel definitely should not be a thing in college sports, even if it is a cool idea
I’ll challenge you here. That may be true for schools with storied athletic departments but I think there are a lot of mid-tier schools that are overspending on their football programs comparative to the revenue generated in an attempt to boost enrollment.
True, but a pro/rel system could make that even worse
Do you have evidence for that thought?
I’m not going to make an argument regarding competitiveness, but rather practicality. There is far too much money involved in D1 football for most schools to willingly drop to even a 2nd division, let alone 4th. How do you propose convincing the schools that won’t be D1 to accept this? How do you tell Arkansas, for example, that they’re losing their games against Georgia and Alabama and replacing them with games against UMass and Dipshit State without them putting up a fight, potentially in court?
They would all be D1 still. Just different conferences like today.
A meaningless distinction if they are stratified in the manner you suggest. “Being D1” is beneficial because you get D1 opponents and the revenue that comes with it. Do you think the EPL and Championship share revenue from TV broadcasting rights evenly? Of course not. They’re both “English football league system,” which is analogous to “D1” in the context of your response here.
That kind of structure makes sense for professional sports, but this is supposed to be about the teams colleges field to compete with other colleges, right? Which makes rivalries between schools much more important than whether any given team can make it to the playoffs. If, for example, either Michigan or Ohio State ended up being relegated to a lower league and "The Game" didn't happen, there would be a huge uproar. While those two teams (or Auburn/Alabama, Utah/BYU, Georgia/Georgia Tech, among others) would love to be playing for a national championship every year, many fans would generally prefer to beat their rival than to lose to their rival and win the championship.
It would be be better for the sport if instead there were actual lower division professional teams, instead of roping colleges into that position. The NFL teams as the current equivalent of the Champions League, then additional teams in lower leagues. Those could fill the role currently filled by colleges, and they would make much more sense to be part of a relegation scheme.
I would not, however, just have the lowest in the NFL automatically relegated. I might have a tournament between the two worst of the NFL and two best of the next league and have them play to determine what changes happen, if any. As I understand it, there is a group of teams that basically float at the edge of relegation all the time, moving back and forth between the levels over and over. That doesn't seem to me to be actually filtering to get the best teams, but the natural results of requiring some teams to shift every year. I will admit that I am not a big fan of the league and so may not know everything going on there.
They have promotion playoffs all over European lower leagues. As well as champions league places.
I ageee the nfl should be the champions league of the pyramid that would be a professional replacement of NCAA.
It’s more complicated than that. Leagues aren’t just who plays who in football, but also all the other sports and they have academic alliances too. It’s unfair to punish say a school like Purdue who is consistently terrible at football but great at basketball and academics. They bring a lot to the big 10.
Also the big10 has 18 teams and the pac12 used to have two but many more are joining
I think the academic benefits of conferences are vastly overstated, particularly by the big10. This also doesn’t stop them from still having a research alliance as many other groups of universities do.
All B1G members (except Nebraska, because their hospital is not on campus) also belong to the Association of American Universities, which is a pretty big deal in academic circles
It can be for just football. Really no reason it can’t be.
So you have a different conference for each sport? That’s a different contract and tv deal for each sport. Possible but sounds difficult
It wouldn't have to be a different TV contract. Teams already play non-conference games. The home team has the TV rights.
Believe it or not that’s already a thing
ND literally does this. They’re in the ACC for all sports other than football, in which they’re an independent.
I think that’s already done by each sport.
I would say there should be two conferences, north and south. So they’d be a north conference team in every league, they just might be Tier 1 in one sport and Tier 3 in another
Only 1 sport is being proposed to have tiers.
I also just want to point out all but USC and Northwestern are large scale public universities with relatively successful alumni. Even when the schools aren't doing well a lot of people with money are tuning in. USC is a national brand that is also super rich. Northwestern has a ton of rich alumni but for whatever reason they don't care for sports. That's why the big ten is so valuable and why relegation is a no go for the top conferences. They're just watering down the brand.
Which schools do you think he didn’t count as being big 10? Obviously Rutgers and Maryland. UCLA, Minnesota, and Iowa would probably be the others.
If the leagues were professional they would be on their own pulleys. Purdue football would have employees at a lower wage rate than Purdue basketball.
My state does high school football alignments and then other sport alignments. It can be done
He’s talking about football only.
This would make sense if you severed the ties between the colleges and the athletic departments.
Short of that... These athletic departments are creatures of the schools. They exist in a competative environment between schools, to attract the greatest quality and quantity of students.
The purpose of the University of Michigan Athletic Department isn't to win football championships. It's to get the University of Michigan M in front of every 14 year old in the country, and plant a seed in their mind that that would be a cool place to go to school.
You can't capture a 14 year old's imagination with your world-class engineering school. But you can make the 14 year old think Michigan is awesome because they saw Blake Corum put the team on his back and win a championship in 2024. Then when they're 17 and they're looking at you, you can wow them with your engineering program.
In light of that, agreeing to promotion and relegation makes no sense. Why would a school that's spent 125 years building a brand like that agree to be relegated if they have a few bad years?
ETA: There's a secondary function of the ADs to create a sense of community that extends beyond graduation. Schools rely on alumni donations for a pretty huge chunk of their budget. Sports serve as a ritual to build community among alumni. This is another factor against ever agreeing to relegation.
indiana would likely be in the second division right now and not eligible for a national championship.
Yes. People who make the relegation argument fail to consider how dynamic CFB is due to the way rosters are constructed. Teams have great seasons out of nowhere and then can immediately fall off a cliff if a bunch of seniors graduate. The transfer era has mitigated that a bit, but it’s still a much more dynamic situation than pro soccer. Under the relegation model you’d have multiple current playoff teams in a lower division because they happened to be garbage a few seasons ago.
They were 11-2 (8-1) in 2024. That would have gotten them promoted.
Yeah from 3rd to 2nd. They were 3-9 the previous season.
And if they were relegated, Mendoza wouldn’t have transferred there, would have stayed at Cal, and Cal would be in the playoffs.
What? That makes no sense. Indiana was better than Cal last year. Why would Mendoza not transfer?
Because they would have been relegated.
Go Bears!
I was basically saying that lots of things would be different in the relegation scenario, and if Indiana was not top division, they wouldn’t get the transfers.
His brother went there when they were bad. I think he likely still transfers to play with him.
My main point is with promotion and relegation you are limiting the number of teams that have a chance at the national championship. Indiana made the playoffs last year after not having more than 4 wins in any of the 3 previous seasons.
College football rosters have too much turnover from year to year. You rarely have your best players more than 2 years.
That might be a benefit. It would encourage teams to build for a longer term success.
It's long past time we had football only conferences. You could do 6 "tiers" each with its own NY6 bowl as it's permanent championship. 20 team "conferences" with 2 divisions. Full round robin in the division. Cross division 8 team playoff in each tier, bottom 2 in each division are relegated.
The other 3 games schedule whoever you want, it'll keep existing rivalries and rekindle old ones, which is incredibly important in CFB. You tie tiers to NIL money, and ideally make players sign multi-year deals. Bribes to transfer is a shitty system.
The Big 10 has 18 teams.
I don’t want the annoying relegation of soccer. Just divide the worthwhile schools into two leagues, the SEC and the Big 10. Take the 5 or so teams each from the Big 12 and ACC and then relegate everyone else to the minor leagues.
I’m good with this. NCAA wants to pretend that everyone has a shot but it’s not remotely true, at least in football, and midmajor conferences are basically playing for nothing.
Div II teams and FCS teams find ways to make their seasons meaningful without competing for the national title and they get along just fine.
Your comment about “worthwhile” schools is exactly why we need a different system
I think simply going back to having divisions and enforcing that every team must be in a division would be ideal. Then every division sends their best team to the playoffs like the NFL
Teams in Europe have massive issues with spending between the different levels. This is only going to exacerbate the issues lower level colleges are having.
Big schools will also never willingly agree to this because relegation would hit their revenue and branding hard.
This already happens if college football too.
Not nearly to the same level. Theres big teams going into administration every few years in Europe. And a lot of the teams that bounce between divisions end up in financial troubles. It’d presumably be worse without the revenue from player sales
That’s fair. I just saw Utah sign a $500 million PE deal and wonder if the same financial trouble is headed towards college football
Yea we know it’s not gonna happen cuz of money
*the championship not the champions league
[deleted]
I think the leagues that have been operating without playoffs for 100 years and are quite popular globally will do just fine.
That's what the FA cup is for.
[deleted]
It's a playoff system that determines a winner on the last day of the season. It just has the added excitement of the entire pyramid having a shot.
The premier league is perfect the way it is. Even if a team has sewn the title up a few weeks before (which doesn’t always happen), there is shit loads to play for like the top 4 champions league places, Europa league, and of course relegation.
I can’t remember a year where the last day was not a good watch for some reason or other.
Having the most points and not winning the league would be a joke. I like the world series and the NBA championship but I don’t think that system would work in football.
[removed]
Your comment has been removed for breaking Rule 2:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
I think this is a great concept but one that might have missed its window. 10 years ago this would have greatly improved the sport, my preference is 3 divisions (A/B/C) 40/40/the rest. Top 24 of ‘A’ enter a playoff for national championship, bottom 10 of A play top 10 of B (reverse rank Last of A plays best of B, second to last plays B#2 etc. same for B/C for a kind of play in/out that is common in soccer. These games become your lesser bowl games to keep that revenue, with real stakes these become important games again.
There are no more unimportant games, no mailing it in after a 3rd loss because there is a big difference at the end of the season between #30 and safe and #31 and facing relegation.
——
The reason I think it’s too late is the transfer portal. With the ease of transferring any team that gets relegated will see its players jump ship.
PL has 20 teams and they all play each other twice 40 games total per side. .The point scoring system to set the table is fair. College football can't match that game number or close without killing players. FBS divided by four would require 64 games per team to determine a fair table ranking. So we'd need a different method of setting the table top to bottom.
But I like the idea of 4 levels and relegation. Watching the bottom teams fight for their lives at the end of the season would be really interesting.
Problem 2...English football teams funding is affected by the league in which they play. College football funding come from universities and boosters who can not be controlled.
No existing sports organization is going to accept relegation. The members would never allow it. It's just way too much of a risk, to have a single bad season and then lose your current status, with devastating impact.
Don't get me wrong, I think relegation and promotion are amazing and I love that it exists in football leagues around the world, but it's existence is purely from legacy. It would never be instituted today, regardless of sport or location.
Just take all of the schools considered Division 1 FCS and FBS and organize them into 8 geographical divisions.
Take top 2 from each of the 8 divisions and put them into a 16-team playoff for the national title. The 3rd and 4th place teams of each division play the normal slate of bowl games. The 7th and 8th place team play a game, loser plays a game against the winner of the top 2 seeds from the relegation league's version of the 8 divisions.
This would be sick but the alumni boosters would absolutely lose their minds if their precious Alabama or Ohio State got relegated to what's basically D2
The money people didn't spend millions on NIL just to watch their team play Eastern Kentucky in front of 12,000 fans
College Football should go back the BCS and scrap the playoffs. The BCS was a an actual playoff since it punished 1 loss teams and gave every game meaning.
Also there was more parity in College Football and it was more fun
The problem with this is football,even at bad programs, pays the bills of the whole athletic department. Your football team gets relegated, the baseball team and every women’s sport is now essentially dead.
It wont work because for pro rel to be equitable you have each team playing at minimum a 19 game season.
That is assuming you do 7 tiers and have 20 in each.
So no it wont work.
The smaller FBS schools are dependent on non-conference road games to sustain the football program. The MAC is one of them, getting millions to play a Big Ten school on the road.
[removed]
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
Alternative take: Education and sports should be two completely unrelated things…
[removed]
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
[removed]
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.
[removed]
Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:
If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.
Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.