As long as I can remember, I’ve been absolutely infatuated with collegiate sports, everything from football to golf and basketball to baseball. I dreamed of guiding my school to the Rose Bowl in January and then a Final Four in March (or April, now). Obviously, that never happened and that’s why dreams are dreams, but something has changed in college sports since I was young and naive. Collegiate athletics has become all about money and capitalizing on every dollar possible. Schools have jumped from conference to conference, looking for an easy dollar.
As far as I’m concerned, this all started when Boston College, Virginia Tech and Miami left the Big East and jumped ship for the greener pastures of the ACC. Since I’ve been alive the Big Ten hasn’t had 10 members, and I’m not sure anybody really knows how many members they have now. I’ve seen TCU go from the WAC to Conference USA to the Mountain West, join the Big East but never play a game and then go running to the Big 12. BYU even left the Mountain West to go independent, flirt with the Big East like a band geek’s prom date, and now is even considering going back to the Mountain West.
Enough is enough already. Conferences used to be about settling geographic and academic rivalries on the field. Boston College is 440 miles from the closest school in their conference, the University of Maryland, which has since left for the Big Ten, and is an overwhelming 1,500 miles from Miami.
I’ve decided to completely dismantle all of the major Division I conferences and start over. Under my new world order of college athletics there will be six conferences all with 13 schools each. Thirteen allows each team to play every other school in the conference and even have a bye week so the student-athletes can get some studying done before finals roll around.
A few concessions do need to be made, however. Notre Dame no longer has the right to hold the entire country hostage, deciding to play a select few in the Big 10 and the cupcake schools from the ACC. Army and Navy can no longer protect the Big East from execution (no pun intended). Also, a few rivalries must come to an end, but I don’t think anybody will mind because Michigan-Minnesota hasn’t been a real rivalry as long as I’ve been alive, and Alabama-Georgia never play in the regular season anyway.
Nonetheless, these conferences aren’t perfect and I know that. Some schools are going to think their conference counterparts do not have the academic reputation they want to associate with and others are going to just be plain insulted…oh well. These conferences are much better than what we have today and make a lot more sense geographically. All these conferences will be able to secure billion-dollar television deals with ESPN, CBS, FOX or whoever is bidding for their services.
Take a look at what I’ve come up with, and sound off in the comments section below on what you think and how you would’ve done it differently…
Conference 1
Boston College
Connecticut
Indiana
Michigan
Michigan State
Notre Dame
Ohio State
Penn State
Pittsburgh
Purdue
Rutgers
Syracuse
Temple
Conference 2
Army
Cincinnati
East Carolina
Kentucky
Louisville
Maryland
Memphis
Navy
Tennessee
Vanderbilt
Virginia
Virginia Tech
West Virginia
Conference 3
Arkansas
Colorado
Illinois
Iowa
Iowa State
Kansas
Kansas State
Minnesota
Missouri
Nebraska
Northwestern
Southern Methodist
Wisconsin
Conference 4
Central Florida
Clemson
Duke
Florida
Florida State
Georgia
Georgia Tech
Miami
North Carolina
North Carolina State
South Carolina
South Florida
Wake Forest
Conference 5
Alabama
Auburn
Baylor
Houston
Louisiana State
Mississippi
Mississippi State
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Christian
Texas Tech
Conference 6
Arizona
Arizona State
Boise State
Brigham Young (BYU)
California-Berkeley
California-Los Angeles (UCLA)
Oregon
Oregon State
Southern California
Stanford
Utah
Washington
Washington State
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