College Football's Manifest Destination

No, the problem with college football is that within a greater framework in which all the conferences must operate, individual conferences are beholden only to themselves.

Imagine that college football is a war, not in terms of the "fields of friendly strife" analogy but rather from an organizational perspective. Extend the analogy so that each conference is a branch of the military: the SEC could be the U.S. Army, the Pac-10 the Navy, the Big Ten the Marines ("Hoo-ah!") and the Big 12 the Air Force. Notre Dame, as an independent contractor earning exponentially more while accomplishing less on the field of battle and inviting resentment from the other branches, would of course be Halliburton.

Anyway, the idea is that each branch of the military answers to a higher authority. The Navy cannot just abscond with 300 planes from the Air Force to fortify its air-craft carriers. Nor can the Army re-conscript an entire company of Marines as army infantry simply to absorb its own losses. Not, at least, without the approval of a higher authority, i.e, the Secretary of Defense, whose own boss is the Commander in Chief.

If every branch of the service acted only in its own best interests without regard to the overall mission, chaos would ensue.

Likewise, your body functions because your various systems (e.g., circulatory, respiratory, nervous and, every sportswriter's favorite, digestive) work in concert with one another. They all exist to support the organism (you), not themselves. Do you know what they call, in medicine, a clump of cells that invades other parts of the body, healthy parts, simply because that clump wants to expand?

Cancer.

Which brings us to the Big Ten.

This week the Big Ten held its spring meetings at its headquarters in suburban Chicago (for now). It was there that commissioner Jim Delany (above right) implied that the Big Ten is not so much a consortium of Midwest-based schools as it is a brand. Or a television network.

"As far as the shifting population, that is reason, by itself, enough, to look at the concept of expansion," Delany told the media. "In the last twenty, thirty years, there's been a clear shift in movement into the Sun Belt."

Delany sounds like a 19th-century politician rationalizing manifest destiny.

If the Big Ten expands, the dominoes will begin to fall elsewhere. It'll be mutually assured destruction from within various Hilton and Hyatt conference rooms across the nation.

Here at FanHouse, we propose an alternative manifest destination for college football. Instead of conferences practicing Darwinism on one another, why not look at the entire FBS landscape as one organism that cannot exist unless everyone cooperates for the good of the whole?



Share The end result may be the same: a further parsing of the have-nots from Division I/FBS. But at least there would be an overriding authority to it all. Instead of a bunch of street gangs (i.e., the conferences) constantly fighting turf wars, there would be a Don Corleone deciding who gets what. We want to be that mafia capo.

Thus, we give you the Super 64. Sixty-four institutions divided into four regional conferences exclusive to football. The other sports, especially non-revenue athletics, would retain membership in their current conferences. Each of the four conferences would be further split into two divisions (conference championship game, cha-ching), but we'll solve that headache later.

Before we unveil the Super 64, a word or two about how they were chosen. First and foremost, it is all about the eyeballs. The highest common denominator, if you will, is home attendance since that almost always mirrors television interest. We arbitrarily made the top-tier cut-off at 50,000 fans per game. Any school that averaged at least 50,000 fans per home game during the 2009 season gains automatic entry into the Super 64.

Forty-six schools, or about 77% of our desired total, made that cut.

Beyond that, there were eleven schools that averaged above 40,000 fans and another fifteen that averaged more than 30,000 in attendance. That's 26 institutions for eighteen spots (current BCS conference members Northwestern and Washington State failed to average even 30,000 per home game last season).

Hence, for the final 18 schools, we considered the following factors: 1) Historical importance to the sport (Miami); 2) Potential for expanding interest (Utah), based primarily on that Sun Belt migration factor to which Delany alluded; 3) Geographical balance (good news for schools west of the Rockies; bad news for the overloaded South) and 4) On-field success (Fresno State).

Here then, divided into the Southeast, Central, Mideast and Pacific Conferences, is the Super 64, our panacea for the impending conference chaos that threatens to undermine the integrity of college football. A few notes on the lists: 1) Schools appear in order of home attendance, most to fewest; 2) Schools in italics are those that failed to reach the automatic entry 50,000-plus-home-attendance metric; 3) Bowls to the right indicate a school's most recent appearance in a BCS bowl (or bowl that became a BCS game if the appearance was before the BCS started) or Cotton Bowl, or, barring that, most recent bowl appearance:

University	Last BCS or Bowl Appearance
Tennessee	2005 Cotton
LSU	'08 BCS Championship Game
Georgia	'08 Sugar
Alabama	'10 BCS
Florida	'10 Sugar
Auburn	'05 Sugar
Clemson	'82 Orange
South Carolina	'09 Papa John's
Florida State	'06 Orange
Kentucky	'09 Music City
Virginia Tech	'09 Orange
Georgia Tech	'10 Orange
North Carolina	'09 Meineke Care Care
South Florida	'09 International
Virginia	'91 Sugar
Miami	'04 Orange

Notes: That's correct, The "U" is fourth in its own state in attendance, behind South Florida. Current BCS conference members Duke, Vanderbilt and Wake Forest all failed to make the cut. So did Central Florida, which averages more in attendance than all three of them. Our question: What school would you remove from the above list to accommodate any of them?

University	Last BCS or Bowl Appearance
Texas	2010 Rose
Nebraska	'02 Rose
Oklahoma	'09 BCS Championship Game
Texas A&M	'05 Cotton
Iowa	'10 Orange
Arkansas	'08 Cotton
Missouri	'08 Cotton
Kansas	'08 Orange
Minnesota	'62 Rose
Mississippi	'10 Cotton
Mississippi State	'99 Cotton
Oklahoma State	'10 Cotton
Texas Tech	'09 Cotton
Kansas State	'04 Fiesta
Iowa State	'09 Insight
TCU	'10 Fiesta

Notes: Just as one-fourth of the Southeast Conference was composed of Florida-based schools, a quarter of the Central is drawn from Texas. Houston may be home to a former Heisman Trophy winner and a current Heisman candidate, but the Cougars average just 25,200 fans per home game. This conference would take in a few refugees from both the current SEC and current Big Ten in order to allow the Midwest and aforementioned Southeast to draw from regions that have more viable candidates.

University	Last BCS or Bowl Appearance
Michigan	2007 Rose
Penn State	'09 Rose
Ohio State	'10 Rose
Notre Dame	'07 Sugar
Wisconsin	'00 Rose
Michigan State	'88 Rose
Illinois	'08 Rose
Pitt	'05 Fiesta
Purdue	'01 Rose
West Virginia	'08 Fiesta
Rutgers	'09 St. Petersburg
Maryland	'02 Orange
Syracuse	'99 Orange
Boston College	'85 Cotton
Cincinnati	'10 Sugar
Northwestern	'96 Rose

Notes: It's the Big Ten (mostly) with the best holdovers from the Big East, plus a pair of Catholic schools and an ACC step-brother. Connecticut has a legitimate beef at being excluded, as does Indiana, which averaged half as many more fans per home contest last year as did Northwestern. Then again, the Hoosiers have been to just one bowl in the past seventeen seasons, and becoming bowl-eligible is not very difficult these days. We may be guilty of including the Wildcats because they're always so entertaining -- and because Brent Musburger's an alum.

University	Last BCS or Bowl Appearance
USC	2009 Rose
UCLA	'99 Rose
Washington	'01 Rose
Brigham Young	'97 Cotton
California	'08 Emerald
Arizona	'94 Fiesta
Colorado	'02 Fiesta
Oregon	'10 Rose
Arizona State	'97 Rose
Oregon State	'01 Fiesta
Stanford	'00 Rose
Utah	'09 Sugar
Boise State	'10 Fiesta
Fresno State	'09 New Mexico
Hawaii	'08 Sugar
Washington State	'03 Rose

Notes: The region is primed for growth. It has the fewest schools -- just half -- that hit the magic 50,000 attendance mark, even though this is the fastest-growing region in the nation, i.e., the Delany demographic. Only one institution, Colorado, is located east of the Continental Divide. Hawaii averaged 50% more in attendance than Wazzu, which is why we invited the Warriors despite the long flight to Honolulu. We have reservations about omitting both Nevada and UNLV, since the Silver State is one of the risers in population. However, neither school averaged even 23,000 fans per home game last season. A shame, too, because Sam Boyd Stadium in Las Vegas is a tiny treasure.

Each school would play the seven members of its division, plus two members from outside its division but within the same conference, annually. Three more games would be played outside the conference, ideally with one opponent coming from each of the other three conferences.

Twelve games, all against schools with relatively similar facilities and talent. At season's end each conference could have a playoff, and that would leave four teams in an FFF: Football Final Four.

So there it is: our modest attempt at rational thought in terms of college football. Because it's better to have divisions than it is divisiveness.