Something to keep an eye on

[RacerJoeD]

https://www.si.com/college/2022/01/20/n ... ball-money

[BCPanther]

We're in the last few years of true 'college athletics'. Its fine, it was going to happen but it sure isn't going to be the same.

[tribecalledquest]

We're in the last few years of true 'college athletics'. Its fine, it was going to happen but it sure isn't going to be the same.

For sure at the D1 level anyway.

[05Racer]

Reading the article, it sounds a lot like the European soccer leagues. Every few years the dominant franchises threaten to form their own 'super league' but they never actually do it because the fans, who are also the customers that generate the revenue said power franchises think they should get more of, are usually dead set against this. The only people who ever seem to be for this are a handful of journalists trying to satisfy some mystical notion of fairness and competitive balance.

A Power 5 super league sounds good in theory but in practice, it would have many problems. First, how do you decide who gets in this super league? Does Vanderbilt get to be in the college super league because they are in the SEC or left out because they are not a whole lot more competitive than those CAA and Conference USA teams that, in the article at least, seem to be getting blamed for the problem. What do you do about dominant schools in basketball that don't play football like Villanova, or Gonzaga? Do they get in? Would they even want in, or would they decide to stick it out with the NCAA for budget/tradition reasons? If they don't, chances are some good teams probably will, and now there are two competing leagues with comparable talent. How much of basketball's popularity is tied to the chaos and upsets of the single elimination tournament that makes it March Madness? Does it even work without the cinderella runs? Would University Presidents, many of whom don't give a flip about sports to begin with, be willing to put up with the headaches of owning a professional sports team on top of what they already do. Would they accept the bad press this would inevitably generate? And who's to say conditions won't change down the road. Sports powers don't always stay the same. Thirty years ago Nebraska was a college football power, now they're an afterthought. Programs rise and fall and what looks like a super league now might not look like one fifty years from now. And we haven't even broached the subject of Title IX or how this super league is all PWI with no HBCU representation.

I think the Power 5 are bluffing. They don't really want to leave. They don't really want much to change at all. They're already making out like bandits without having to 'do' anything but business as usual. They just want to use the threat to gain concessions that favor them. It's not really much different than an employee threatening to leave for a better salary at a competitor, just to needle their employer into giving a pay raise. The last thing they want is two competing collegiate sports leagues, and if they left the NCAA, that's what they would have. It would be back to split national championships again, like college football up until the BCS, or like when the NIT and NCAA tournaments were actually separate tournaments that competed with each other. The NCAA worked really hard to establish their monopoly. I can't see anyone being stupid enough to actually break up a monopoly they already control. It would be like if the third of MLB teams that spend 150+ million dollars in salary decided they could make more money by forming their own league. It is absurd on its face and I can't think of who would actually think this is a good idea besides idiot sports writers who worship the Power 5 because they're journalists that studied how to manipulate words to mean whatever they want instead of learning how the world actually works, and it always seems to be journalists that are perpetuating this non-story. The Power 5 will probably get some concessions, if only so they can declare victory, but they won't form their own league. Mark my words, this won't happen, but in the unlikely event it does, I'll be LMAO. Getting division 1 divided more than it already is won't happen either, because the richest schools are outnumbered by those with more limited means, even in their own conferences in some cases. That would be inarguably the worst outcome but I can't see a majority of schools going for it because it's not in the majority's best interest.

[BCPanther]

The Euro soccer leagues don't have the US Congress to deal with.

Athletes are going to be employees and the educational ties are going to be thin at best. We're headed for a system where these kids work for the universities and are full time athletes.

[unipanther99]

The fact that the power five can't get on the same page about an expanded playoff hopefully means they will have the same disfunction in these talks.

Truly though, D1 needs to shed itself of about 5-6 conferences.

I've thought that hosting a neutral site conference tournament would be a good cut-off. If a conference can't afford to do that, they really shouldn't be participating in the NCAA Tournament.

[tribecalledquest]

The fact that the power five can't get on the same page about an expanded playoff hopefully means they will have the same disfunction in these talks.

Truly though, D1 needs to shed itself of about 5-6 conferences.

I've thought that hosting a neutral site conference tournament would be a good cut-off. If a conference can't afford to do that, they really shouldn't be participating in the NCAA Tournament.

I know people wouldn't like it but I agree. There should really be about 20-24 conferences. Tighten it up on the back end. Still give automatic berths but not as many. The non P5's are either going to have to give a little or get shut out. Giving some would be the smarter move.

[BCPanther]

Top 20 leagues (you take care of all the leagues that are going to be the new DI football which will be combo of the G5 and top of FCS)

P5 + Big East, AAC, A10, Valley, MW, WCC, CUSA, Sun Belt, MAC, Big Sky, Summit, CAA, SoCon, MAAC, WAC (200ish teams)

96 team tournament. Conference Tournament and Regular Season Champ both get auto bids, don't get a second one if the same team wins both.

Print Money.

[05Racer]

The fact that the power five can't get on the same page about an expanded playoff hopefully means they will have the same disfunction in these talks.

Truly though, D1 needs to shed itself of about 5-6 conferences.

I've thought that hosting a neutral site conference tournament would be a good cut-off. If a conference can't afford to do that, they really shouldn't be participating in the NCAA Tournament.

That's a great point. The P5 aren't exactly uniform themselves. Even within the Power 5, there are huge spending discrepancies between haves and have nots. Vanderbilt and Mississippi St, for example, spend roughly half what Florida does, though the numbers I'm using are a couple years old. Other conferences have bigger discrepancies. You don't have to look very hard to find news stories about how some schools are losing money trying to keep up.

I agree for the most part about trimming the back half of division 1. Murray finally got out of a conference that embodies that very problem. About half the teams left in the OVC should be Division 2 and many were D2 quite recently. Cutting the bottom 100 to 150 programs from D1 would be ideal, IMHO, but I have no idea how the NCAA could get the support for that.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see some kind of relegation/promotion system like the European soccer leagues because that would account for the rising and falling fortunes of the program and add a level of excitement and competition where everyone is competing to 'move up' to the next level. Say, the top level for basketball is 150-200 teams, and the teams at the top of the lower division can have some kind of relegation tourney with the bottom of the upper one. For every Belmont or NKU that moves up to D1 and builds a good program, there are four or five UTMartin types that just show up and collect a check. Relegation/promotion even between D1 and D2 could solve some of these issues. If you're good enough to compete with D1 teams, why should how many scholarships you give out even matter? Let the results on the court/field decide. Teams moving up would have an incentive and ability to upgrade their program when they get into a higher revenue zones, and it would reward the programs that built winning organizations rather than simply who is biggest or who happened to land in the right conference when they were forming seventy years ago. What could better embody the competitive spirit? The chance of anything like this happening is about zero, but it would be fun, IMHO.

[racernation]

BCPanther took the words right off my screen. I almost posted something nearly identical earlier.

What I would do is invite 16 conferences, give two bids to each automatically. I'd trim the tourney to 64, for the sake of how popular brackets are with the general public (no 96 teams). Then, if I were the God of college sports, I'd cap 16 teams per conference for 256 total. There are definitely 100 programs that shouldn't be Division I, probably more.

OR

Require a minimum athletic budget spend of $15 million and introduce caps, with whatever comes over being distributed down to the have-nots. It's communism, but for this, it works.