The 15-team ACC "pool" offers us much better football

Sep 6, 2020, 12:35 PM

No offense to prior years, but there was a lot of dead weight and fluff in the actual season. If Clemson wants to have exhibition games they should have them, but that's all games against Citadel or Akron - which was terrible even by MAC standards - would have offered us.

But this year 10 of our 11 games are actually likely to be at least somewhat worth watching and certainly meaningful, and I particularly like the result: 15 teams go into the pool, the actual top two come out for the championship game...and no matter how hard the SEC might lobby, the winner there is pretty much guaranteed a slot in the playoffs.

Easy. Fair. Sensible. Amazing how that happens when an actual solution is needed.

Which offers us a chance to see what should again be obvious: the conferences are artificial creations that are about money and leveraged negotiating power than about good football or good rivalries. You want to see good football, do it the way professional sports leagues most everywhere else in the world - strangely, not America - do it: pour all the teams into a pool and divide them up by tiers. The teams at the bottom of each tier that are terrible get bumped down to the minor leagues, the top teams from the minors move up and get a chance to prove they belong in the bigs. ("Tanking" doesn't get you the #1 draft pick, it gets your whole team demoted. Which provides a real incentive to not quit when the season starts going badly.) This is called the "promotion/relegation" model and I've been squawking for it for years.

Imagine pouring all the college teams in America into four (or eight!) pools and then just dividing them up into tiers...so instead of games against the likes of Citadel, Akron, Wake Forest, etc, all our games would be against regional foes roughly equal to ourselves in terms of fan base, support, and financial resources...and all within driving distance. You know: our fans in their stadiums in Athens, Opelika, Nashville, or Chapel Hill for away games. Their actual fans in our stadium for home games. That actual rivalry thing again. Dividing the US up into 8 regions would give us a region consisting of probably North & South Carolina, Tennesee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Imagine an 11-team division that gives us a set 10-game season (5 home, 5 away) against the following:

1. Clemson
2. South Carolina
3. North Carolina
4. North Carolina State
5. Virginia
6. Virginia Tech
7. West Virginia
8. Tennessee
9. Kentucky
10. Louisville
11. ONE of probably either Wake, Duke, or Vanderbilt...the others would be in the region's second division.

Speaking of the second division, it'd likely look like this:
1 & 2. TWO of probably Wake, Duke, or Vanderbilt
3. Coastal Carolina
4. App State
5. East Carolina
6. Memphis
7. Middle Tennessee State
8. Old Dominion
9. Marshall
10. UNC Charlotte
11. Western Kentucky

...and the top 2-3 of those would get the chance every year to move up while the bottom 2-3 would get a chance to move down. (Of course, this would likely put the Gamecocks down in D2 because we all know they can't beat App State, but no plan is ever truly perfect.)

Anyhow, you get the idea. And the winner of each region gets a playoff slot, with no Committee or talking heads required.

Games worth watching again...against fan bases actually worth hating. Wouldn't that be a nice switch?

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Your so far off base,IMO,that the pitcher could roll the ball to first base and you would be out
Oh, sorry you are talking football, not baseball, but...
Why would you have us playing 3 schools in the Virginia's and not Ga.Tech ,or FSU,schools we have played in the last decade alone.Sure they are down right now,but I don't think many of us expect that to last to long.
And then you have us playing Tennessee,and Kentucky with no mention of UGA. Hell, I'd rather play the Dawg' than those teams ,or the COOTS any day of the week.
And I won't even try to understand your 2nd division.
Besides ,do you honestly think the other conferences would go for something like this?I doubt it.
Finally,in any non virus season,schools like the Citadel,or Akron rely on that game against a Clemson for money for their athletic program.
No,maybe I am missing something here,but what you are proposing,IMO,isn't it.

The 15-team ACC "pool" offers us much better football

Re: The 15-team ACC "pool" offers us much better football

I rather see 8 8 teams conf and each Conf Champ make PO Like this

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