Tyler’s Take: 80 FBS Football Teams In 2020

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Four New SEC teams Would Have Killed 40

Five things stand out after all the dust has settled:

1)      Mike Slive “joked” he could add about 30 teams in 30 seconds (my words and not his), and only weeks later he would actually be put to the test to find just one in about 48 hours.

2)      Because two invitations would have been accepted by nearly any school asked, the NCAA must have been on the verge of tears because it would have set the wheels in motion to change NCAA football forever. It didn’t happen because Slive didn’t want an ocean of blood on his hands, so now the NCAA and Mark Emmert owes the SEC in a HUGE way. 

3)      The SEC is eyeing 14 teams and not 16. I assume 14 is the magic number because the SEC can sign new contracts without blowing up the entire system if it went to 16. Adding four instead of two would lead to a massive realignment and potential revenue sharing, thus diluting the SEC’s annual take.

4)      I’m calling Slive’s bluff. He knows full-scale realignment is eventually coming, but he didn’t want to set off the fire alarm just yet.

5)       NCAA Armageddon was stopped, but 80 FBS teams in 2020 is reality.

Let’s review SEC options I thought were on the table one last time…

Option 1 – Pick with the left hand

Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Missouri. The SEC brand expands into the Midwest and Texas. Missouri opens the St. Louis market, and relieves Arkansas of the adopted son tag some 20+ years later. This is also a win-win since Arkansas is already a natural rival. Collateral Damage: The Big-12 disintegrates within seconds.

Option 2 – Pick with the right hand

Florida State, Virginia Tech, Clemson and Georgia Tech. Perfect from a geographical and rivalry standpoint for existing SEC teams, exclusive of moving into Virginia the conference is adding teams in states it already owns. In a world all about eyeballs watching television this collection makes the least amount of sense. Collateral Damage: The ACC disintegrates in milliseconds and the self-proclaimed Ivy League schools of the south no longer have a home.

Option 3 – Pick with both hands

Neatly place Texas A&M and Missouri in the West and Florida State and Virginia Tech in the East. Ultimately, the SEC gets nearly everything it wants without totally destroying the conferences it borrowed its new teams from. (I write the word borrow on purpose.)

The SEC in 2014

The NCAA in 2020 – What does it look like?

With TCU now in the same conference as Syracuse – a mere 31 driving turns and 1,591 miles away – the shape of college football is becoming so oblong it will no longer be passable in a few years. Simply put, the NCAA has yet another problem weighing heavily on its slow-moving hands. The problem is not having one football team join another conference half way across the country to catch the BCS money train, it’s all the other non-revenue sports teams that must travel the same path to play their games without a money train.

Outside of March Madness college football owns the NCAA, so with that in mind here’s the plan.

Step 1:  Only 80 NCAA teams will play FBS football in 2020. Teams will be divided geographically into four conferences, each with two divisions of ten teams. I reached the magic number of 80 with the 2010 college football home attendance figures. If a team didn’t average more than 30,000 fans for home games it doesn’t deserve to play with the big boys, end of story. *I was generous enough to keep two current BCS schools in even though they didn’t hit 30,000: Duke (28,750) and Washington State (24,532). Actually, I take that back. Maybe we swap East Carolina for Duke since nobody likes the Blue Devils.

Four Independents and 10 or so non-BCS teams join the 80, and “borderline” teams that can be swapped out for others.

Step 2: Schools that don’t make the cut will be “demoted” to the FCS. To soften the blow there will be guaranteed games against the new FBS 80 and revenue sharing, too. All new and current FCS schools realign themselves the best possible way… by sitting down at a table and looking at a map.

Step 3: All NCAA teams in every sport besides football remain in their current conference unless it makes sense for a particular team to return closer to home. (See TCU returning back to Texas.)

That’s it. Is it a perfect fit in some cases? No. Will it be strange to have one conference for football and one for all other sports?  The BCS started us down this path of football separation in its first season.

ATLANTIC

1)      North Carolina                  11) UCONN

2)      N.C. State                            12) Boston College

3)      Wake Forest                      13) Navy

4)      East Carolina                      14) Maryland

5)      Virginia                                                15) Syracuse

6)      Virginia Tech                     16) Army

7)      Vanderbilt                          17) Rutgers

8)      Tennessee                          18) Penn. State

9)       West Virginia                   19) Pittsburg

10)   Louisville                            20) Cincinnati

SOUTH

1)      Miami                                   11) Alabama

2)      Florida                                  12) Auburn

3)      Florida State                      13) Ole Miss

4)      Central Florida                  14) Miss. State

5)      South Florida                     15) Southern Miss.

6)      Georgia                                                16) LSU

7)      Georgia Tech                     17) Arkansas

8)      Clemson                              18) Missouri

9)      South Carolina                  19) Oklahoma

10)   Kentucky                             20) Oklahoma State

MIDWEST

1)      Notre Dame                       11) Iowa

2)      Indiana                                 12) Iowa State

3)      Purdue                                 13) Kansas

4)      Illinois                                  14) Kansas State

5)      Northwestern                   15) Nebraska

6)      Ohio State                          16) Texas

7)      Michigan                             17) Texas A&M

8)      Michigan State                  18) Baylor

9)      Minnesota                          19) TCU

10)   Wisconsin                           20) Houston

WEST

1)      Colorado                             11) Cal

2)      Air Force                              12) Fresno State

3)      BYU                                        13) San Diego State

4)      Utah                                      14) Oregon

5)      Arizona                                                15) Oregon State

6)      Arizona State                     16) Washington

7)      Boise State                         17) Washington State

8)      USC                                        18) Hawaii

9)      UCLA                                     19) Texas Tech

10)   Stanford                              20) UTEP