College Football Relegation

The following is the first in a series of posts I plan to put up, which constitute the entirety of my answer to “why don’t you post anymore?”

This all started with my Dad.

'I can't believe the SEC hasn’t just kicked Vanderbilt out at this point," I said (hilariously) as the Commodores blew their opener against South Carolina in a race to the bottom that would have made Sean Hannity blush.

My Dad said "maybe we need relegation."

After making the requisite "that would be awesome, except Miami would be in the Sun Belt," joke, I hung up the phone, ordered a pizza, and started researching. See you later, Labor Day Weekend.

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Let me give you a little background. In my day job --- I have a day job --- I work as the Director of International TV Research at a Hollywood movie studio. I love my job, mostly because I love TV. And, obviously I love college football, the greatest soap opera of all time and itself nothing more than this country’s longest running TV show.

Lately, I have been struggling to come up with ways to pair both in this space.

I can only write the same "Georgia Tech is a bunch of nerds" joke so many times, and I don't think anyone cares about reading my opinion of You're The Worst (although I am more than happy to give it).

So when I got an idea to combine the worlds of research and college football I was immediately consumed by it.

The idea: what if, starting in 2005---the year my buddies and I cursed the Miami football team by enrolling at the university---the NCAA FBS football conferences had adopted a system of relegation and promotion? What if the worst team in each of the (then) 6 major conferences got kicked out at the end of every season, and the 5 'lesser' conferences sent their champions upward?

How different would college football look? Would it be good or bad for the product? And, most importantly to everyone here, how badly would Miami have fared?

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For those unfamiliar, Relegation comes to us from the world of European Football. At the end of every season in the English Premiere League, Germany's Bundesliga, Spain's La Liga, et al, the three worst teams get relegated to the next level down. Meanwhile, the 3 best teams from the level below earn a spot in the top flight for the next season.

Let's look at the EPL, because it is easiest to type the names of those teams, it is the richest league in the world, and it is where my team, Liverpool, plays.

(That’s right, I picked Liverpool. A fan of the Dolphins and the Orioles willingly signed up to root for Liverpool.)

At the end of the 2015-16 season, Leicester City...a Cinderella that BARELY avoided relegation itself the prior season during a run that has since been labeled "The Great(est) Escape"...were crowned champions. Meanwhile, legendary clubs Newcastle FC and Aston Villa were demoted to the lesser Championship Division. It was one of the greatest sports dramas to every play out, and I watched every second of it, from the opening weekend to the finale, at rapt attention.

For a fan, even if your team isn’t good, every game has meaning. The object of sport is to win, but barring that, the goal becomes not to lose. It is hard to put this all into American context, but I'll try.

Since there is no minor league in football, and because the NBA D-League is still in its infancy, let's look to baseball.

Imagine if all the Triple-A teams were run independently and the minor league squads bought and sold players without any exclusive relationship to a parent team. And then imagine that the Toledo Mud Hens not only were given a shot in the major leagues, but won the World Series. And at the end of that same season, two historic teams...maybe not the Yankees and Red Sox, but certainly the Braves and Orioles...were banished to Triple A.

Pretty amazing, right?

A story like Leicester is rare....the winner of the EPL has been a team not named Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, or Arsenal only twice in 25 years of competition. But Leicester City is the poster child for a system that gives hope to every team in England, no matter how small. And it isn’t just about the team that finished first; if you scan the Premiere League, it is full of stories of clubs on the verge of bankruptcy saving themselves by winning promotion and the associated riches. Bournemouth, Swansea City, Leicester....the examples are many.

The Relegation/Promotion system gives hope to every pub team in the country. If you play hard enough, for long enough, one day you might work your way up. The odds are stacked heavily against you, but it is possible.

My Sunday night beer league softball team could, in theory, win the World Series one day.

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In American college football, The BCS Era lasted from 1998 - 2013. We all remember it. We all hated it.

In 15 years, 11 Group of 5 teams finished undefeated. Utah, TCU and Boise State all played in multiple BCS games. Utah and Boise swept their BCS bowl appearances (totaling to 5 wins), and TCU won the Rose Bowl...meaning they were all good enough to get close to the mountaintop on more than one occasion, and often good enough to take down a big boy, like Oklahoma or Florida. Those are the facts.

Here’s another: none of them played for a National Championship. They were locked out by the argument that they didn't play a difficult enough schedule to warrant a seat at the table. And that's fine...except, we don't know. Maybe they WERE good enough. After all, if they made it that close to the top of the sport that many times, can we really say it was a fluke? If you keep beating the big guys, doesn't that eventually mean that you ARE a big guy?

If they were in a big conference, we DEFINITELY would have found out.

So, not only does every little guy get new hope, but we also would crown one indisputable national champion every year. And beyond hope...which is as American as it gets...we get accountability.

Let's go back to MLB. I am a lifelong devotee of the Baltimore Orioles, and for the majority of my life they have been terrible. For years, they never got better, ownership never changed course...and there was no downside. At the end of every season, no matter how bad they were, they still got the gate receipts from 81 home games against Major League opponents, and they still got their revenue sharing check.

(This is the part where we laugh at Americans that call European Football “socialist” even though they brutally exile the 3 worst teams at the end of every season while the American Pastime literally redistributes the wealth from the rich teams to the poor teams to try and balance everyone out.)

Same thing with the Miami Dolphins. Sure, they might go 8-8 every year, but other than the fans, who suffers? They still have a massive TV deal, they still get their cut of league revenues, and they still get access to the draft, where they get monopolized, exclusive access to premium talent in inverse relation to their performance on the field.

Who suffers? Me. My dad. You. The FANS.

Do I think relegation would solve all these issues? No.

Do I think that owners might be willing to be more creative and invest more money in the correct places if they knew their access to the cushy life and multiple revenue streams of the big leagues could be taken away from them? Yes.

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So how would this work?

Back in 2005, there were 6 BCS conferences: ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12, Pac 10 and SEC.

There were 5 lesser leagues: Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Sun Belt and WAC.

Now, obviously the relegation part was simple. Each of the Big 6 would kick out the worst team in their league, as dictated by conference W-L records. And obviously, the winner of each of the 5 smaller conferences (the Group of 5) would achieve promotion.

But then we ran into our first numbers problem. And, again, the EPL helped lend a hand.

In the EPL, the Top 2 teams in the Championship Division gain promotion to the Prem automatically.

Straightforward enough.

Then it gets interesting.

The 3rd promotion spot is the winner of a 4 team tournament comprised of the teams that finish 3rd - 6th in the Championship Division table. It culminates in the "richest match in the world", where the winner of each semi-final plays a winner take all match at Wembley Stadium, the winner of which secures promotion and the loser of which...doesn't. And the stakes are VERY high...the difference between a spot in the EPL and a spot in the Championship is valued between $200 - $250 million when TV money and ticket / merchandise sales are taken into account.

Now THAT is great TV!

So, in order to find a 6th team for promotion, we would have a 4 team playoff, made up of the losers of the MAC and Conference USA Championship games and 2 at-large teams, drawn from the remaining Group of 5 teams and any non-Notre Dame independents. And the final game could be the Saturday before the BCS National Championship Game!

And what conferences do these promoted and relegated teams go to?

For demoted teams, I tried to just get them into a conference that made sense in terms of geography...I wasn't very worried about numbers, because quite frankly, it wasn't that important to me.

For promoted teams, I came up with the following system: at the end of every season, once the champions had been determined, the 6 BCS Conference commissioners would get together in a room (probably the SPECTRE / FIFA headquarters) and draft the 6 promoted squads, with the draft order determined by the rank of the top team in each conference in the final BCS standings.

In another scenario, I like the idea of determining draft order on APR scores and rewarding conferences for academic success....but then again, I think those scores are complete crap, so I'm not sure if it is worth going through the charade.

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Allow me to anticipate an obvious, fair question that I am certain all 4 people that have made it to this point in the post must be asking.

"How do you compare teams in different conferences, or at different levels, if they never played each other?"

The major system that I used to put all teams on a level playing field was Football Outsiders' F/+, which measures drive by drive and game by game efficiencies. It isn't perfect, but it is the best I have come across. To wit: I compared the Top 5 F/+ rankings off of the final AP Top 10 in each season from 2005-2015 and found that in an average season they usually had about 3.5 teams in common, and the top team in common 9 times out of 11.

The takeaway: if your team was efficient, as determined by F/+, then you probably won a lot of football games. Additionally, the stat weights good performance against good teams (even in a loss) more than middling performance against bad teams (even in a win). Which is exactly what I was after.

That doesn’t remove the obvious: this is all a projection, and of course once you make one change, everything moving forward changes. It’s like a promo for that crappy new show on NBC.

If I move Tulsa from Conference USA to the SEC...would their efficiency numbers have changed a lot based on level of competition week in and week out? Of course, but probably not as much as you’d think.

I tried to err on the side of status quo...unless there was a LARGE gap in efficiency numbers between Tulsa and Ole Miss, as an example, I would err on the side of Ole Miss and their SEC-level recruiting and facilities. But, this IS college football, a sport we love in large part because of the chaos and silliness it produces on a weekly basis. So yes, some of these assumptions are flawed, but ironically that makes them (possibly more) realistic.

And, let's not forget, this is a giant "what if?" Once one outcome is recorded, EVERYTHING afterward is changed. If, in 2008, I project a move based on data that isn't convincingly past the bar in either direction, it changes everything moving forward. This is a fun scenario and I did the best I could, but it is just ONE outcome of hundreds of thousands of potential outcomes.

I doubt this will cause any of you fine readers any outrage, but if it does, a couple of things: I’m all ears, and also, you should re-evaluate some things.

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Let's look at 2005.

Miami went 9-2 in the regular season and we were DEVASTATED. We were ranked 3rd in the country before we blew our penultimate night game to Georgia Tech. We still thought Larry Coker was awesome.

Simpler times. The Halcyon Days.

Excuse me while I pour myself a martini.

Here's how the relegations would have gone:

ACC - Duke

Big East - Syracuse

Big 10 - Illinois

Big 12 - Oklahoma State

SEC - Ole Miss

3 big basketball schools go down right away in Duke, Syracuse, and Illinois...a good time for a reminder that this experiment has to happen in a football-only vacuum, because these all happen to be schools considered part of the core of their conferences and you can imagine the conferences would NEVER go for a scenario in which they might lose the Duke or Syracuse basketball programs from their ranks.

Additionally, Oklahoma State and Ole Miss...now perennial Top 25 teams...would be banished in this scenario. Which leaves us time to bring up another good point.

In the EPL, there are coaches known for their ability to manufacture a late season rally to avoid relegation, such as Sam Allardyce. They are not men you bring in to build a program, but short term solutions you pull in to the boat mid-stream to get everyone rowing in the same direction (boom, metaphor).

Would a school like Ole Miss or Oklahoma State have the patience to hire a Mike Gundy or Hugh Freeze, young program builders, if they knew that taking their lumps for a year or 2 of rebuilding might mean saying goodbye to the SEC or Big 12 and the revenues that come with it? Tough to say, but I imagine a world in which guys like Houston Nutt and Ty Willingham go to a new school every October to try and spring a turnaround. Chaos!

Unfortunately, this is an impossible scenario to control for. So here's another operating principle of this project: I don't assume that any team would have seen REMARKABLE variance. IF a team went 7-6 despite their F/+ ranking in the Top 25 *cough* Miami *cough* then they get treated like a 7-6 team. A relegation may have gotten a coach fired or hired, but I haven't figured out how to model that. Another imperfection.

Looking back at this, Ole Miss was the hard luck team this year. They were actually much better than Mississippi State in F/+ over the course of the season, but they also lost their head to head matchup with Mississippi State at the end of the season. That would be a particularly bitter pill to swallow...not only losing bragging rights, but also getting kicked out of the conference by your in-state rival.

Luckily for my brother, Ole Miss would have their revenge in later years.

With these relegations, that means it is time to bring up 6 new squads to replace them:

Sun Belt - Arkansas State

Mountain West - TCU

Conference USA - Tulsa

MAC - Akron

WAC - Boise State (This was the year of their Fiesta Bowl upset of Oklahoma)

At-Large - Toledo

Akron was remarkably worse than NIU and Toledo in the MAC this year, but they had the benefit of being in the opposing, weaker division and then sprung an upset on NIU in the conference championship game.

Similarly, Arkansas State was a bad team. They went 6-6 but won a bad conference despite a F/+ rank of 104. Pretty brutal. Like I said, this is a sport that thrives BECAUSE of the irrational, so who are we to argue?

Tulsa was actually a really good team this year. This was back when Steve Kragthorpe was their young hotshot coach, before he went to Louisville and nearly killed their program. TCU and Boise were awesome teams that would have been great to watch in the Pac 10 and Big 12, respectively, that season.

In the at large tournament, the seeding would have worked as follows:

1.) NIU (MAC runner-up)

2.) Toledo

3.) Nevada

4.) UCF (Conference USA runner-up)

The way I constructed this tournament was to have 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3 in head to head semi-finals before a winner-take-all final. Games would be played at the higher seed's home stadium.

I determined the results by plugging each matchup into an Internet Randomizer (because head to head match ups of Group of 5 teams are pretty random) and taking whoever got 2 out of 3 results their way.

Anyway, NIU and Toledo, both teams that could rightfully claim to be the best team in the MAC, ended up in the final, with Toledo pulling an upset on the road to win.

Here's how the "expansion draft" would have gone:

Big 12 - TCU

Pac 10 - Boise State

SEC - Tulsa

Big 10 - Toledo

Big East - Akron

ACC - Arkansas State

This one worked out, with all conferences selecting teams that made sense (more or less) for them geographically, minus the ACC, which got Arkansas State, the ugly duckling of the bunch. Tulsa would have been a natural fit in the Big 12, with Oklahoma needing a new in-state rival to replace Oklahoma State, but they never would have passed on TCU...and the SEC works out pretty well. Boise finds a natural home, as does Toledo. Akron and Arkansas State are considered cannon fodder for their new conferences, bad teams that won't threaten established members or result in an outrageous increase in travel expense, although I can't imagine airfare from Boston to Jonesboro, Arkansas, is cheap.

Important to remember here: this was before conferences had their own TV networks, and before they really made TV their top priority when it came to expansion. Everyone operated within a sort of Gentleman’s Agreement. They stuck to regional footprints and tried to do right by the schools already in the conference.

A LOT has changed in 10 years. There was no internet streaming of games back then, no ESPNU, no Fox Sports 1...most coverage was still regional, and the revenues reflected that.

This will come in to play later, I just figured I would take a moment now to talk about TV. By the way, have you guys watched 'Atlanta' yet? It's not good.

It's freakin' GREAT.

Next time, we look at 2006.