Expansion - A Novel Approach That Will Never Happen

The potential expansion of the Big Ten and the PAC-10, perhaps at the expense of the Big 12 has been the center of college football discussion throughout the summer. Since there have been some pretty wild ideas put out there, we thought we'd throw in our own suggestion. And since none of the college presidents will be listening to us any way, why not propose the best 16-team monster conference that we can come up with? We ignore many of the factors that often play a part in such decisions, such as geography, existing rivalries and whether the college presidents think a school does enough research to be good in football. (We often have wondered what being a "research institution" has to do with playing football, not to mention such important athletic-related details as what religion the institution is affiliated with - but we guess it's just important to some people that such details control their football-based decisions.) Instead, we simply have analyzed the data and come up with the best 16-team football conference we could come up with.

Each school's record was analyzed for the past 40 years. We intend to go further back, but so far our analysis only goes back 40 years, so we're stuck with just looking at a team's history since 1970. Teams were evaluated based on historical success as a football team, with more recent success weighted heavier than success 40 years ago. The idea was to try and form a 16-team conference that contains the teams who have most consistently been good during the past 40 years and who have also been good recently based on the admitedly flawed premise that teams that fit this profile are most likely to be good in the future. (We admit this is a flawed premise, and yet this is the same premise the BCS has been using to justify giving teams from 6 conferences automatic bids to the highest-paid bowl games. It is still flawed, but at least we don't give credit to teams like the Duke Blue Devils - who rate out historically as the 101st most deserving team - just because they happen to have managed to be in the same conference as some consistently good teams.)

Anyway, here is the list of teams - our suggestion for a 16-team dream conference consisting of the most consistenly good football teams in the nation (in alphabetical order):

Alabama Crimson Tide
Auburn Tigers
Florida Gators
Florida State Seminoles
Georgia Bulldogs
LSU Tigers
Miami Hurricanes
Michigan Wolverines
Nebraska Cornhuskers
Ohio State Buckeyes
Oklahoma Sooners
Penn State Nittany Lions
Tennessee Volunteers
Texas Longhorns
USC Trojans
Virginia Tech Hokies

If the presidents from these 16 schools could get together and form a brand new conference, the TV revenue alone would be off the charts.  And the winner of the conference would almost certainly be a shoo-in to win the national championship.  Of course, this would destroy the current BCS system or - for that matter - the bowls, because the conference championship might as well be the national championship. So, in the interest of keeping a national title game, we add 16 more teams to the mix. You might consider this a second-tier monster conference, but we have something else in mind. First, the list of the next 16 teams, again chosen through the same analysis as the first list - a 40-year history of success, with more recent success weighted higher than success decades ago.
 
Arizona State Sun Devils
Arkansas Razorbacks
Boise State Broncos
Boston College Eagles
BYU Cougars
Clemson Tigers
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
Iowa Hawkeyes
Notre Dame Fighting Irish
Oregon Ducks
Texas A&M Aggies
Texas Tech Red Raiders
UCLA Bruins
Utah Utes
West Virginia Mountaineers
Wisconsin Badgers

Rather than making a second, lesser conference, we suggest splitting the 32 teams into two conferences (for lack of a better name, an Eastern Conference and a Western Conference). Further, each conference will be split into two divisions (a Northern and Southern Division of each conference). This puts geography back into the equation, which is actually a good thing considering the cost of sending your entire football team across the country. The champions of the two conferences (after the conference championship games/semifinals) would then meet in the national title bowl game - at least that is what we would expect to happen most often.
 
This whole list is, of course, open to discussion - especially since it simply won't happen. TCU fans will wonder why Boise State is included and TCU is not, when Boise State was a Division I-AA school until 1996 - not exactly a 40-year history. It is true that our analysis only takes into account years in which the school competed in the highest division of football, giving Boise State a bit of an advantage. However, Boise State still rates higher than TCU if only the years since 1996 are taken into account. TCU was pretty consistenly dreadful prior to 2000.  And it is pretty impressive how quickly Boise State moved from Division I-AA status to a competitive team on the national scale. If we decide on a way to penalize Boise State for being a Division I-AA school and if, as a result of this, they are pushed from the list, the next school in would actually be Michigan State.
 
Since we are discussing a pair of fictional football conferences that will never actually be created, we might as well go all the way and suggest alignments for the two conferences. Here is what we suggest, given these 32 teams to work with:
 
Western Conference
 
North Division
Arizona State Sun Devils
Boise State Broncos
BYU Cougars
Nebraska Cornhuskers
Oregon Ducks
UCLA Bruins
USC Trojans
Utah Utes

South Division
Arkansas Razorbacks
Iowa Hawkeyes
LSU Tigers
Oklahoma Sooners
Tennessee Volunteers
Texas Longhorns
Texas A&M Aggies
Texas Tech Red Raiders

Eastern Conference

North Division
Boston College Eagles
Michigan Wolverines
Notre Dame Fighting Irish
Ohio State Buckeyes
Penn State Nittany Lions
Virginia Tech Hokies
West Virginia Mountaineers
Wisconsin Badgers

South Division
Alabama Crimson Tide
Auburn Tigers
Clemson Tigers
Florida Gators
Florida State Seminoles
Georgia Bulldogs
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
Miami Hurricanes

The tough schools to place geographically this way are Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. It would have been nice to have been able to place the three of them in the same division, but in order to balance the number of schools in each division, they end up getting split up and each ends up with the worst travel situations among the 32 schools.

Well, that is our "dream" conference alignment - an alignment that we think would give marquis matchups every week of the regular season. Network TV executives take note. We'd even suggest a system whereby the analysis of all of the FBS teams that we have performed be recalculated at the end of each year, giving other teams the opportunity to move up into this pair of superconferences by establishing a strong history of success or dropping teams from the conferences that fall off drastically and lose that winning tradition, thereby ensuring that the most consistently good teams are represented each year in the conference (while allowing teams, because of the nature of the calculation, to have a "rebuilding" year or two without completely risking their place in the upper echelon of the sport).

We'd love to hear your responses and comments. After all, this is no less likely to happen than many of the other crazy ideas we've heard out there - and we think our suggestion makes sense as a starting point - at least in terms of creating the best football. What do you think?