Re: Who leads their team to a bowl game first
Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2017 12:25 ammrydel wrote:Saban is going to get it changed to being required to play only P5 schools. Not sure if he is working on that for NCAA or just SEC.
I have memories of a long ago Sports Illustrated article, perhaps by Paul Zimmerman, that was perhaps the first discussion of Div. I-A (by any name) conferences playing to a national Championship. It might have been before the dissolution of the SWC. Anyway, among the ideas were that the conferences enrolled would put one team in the post season tournament, and that independents like Notre Dame could agree to an affiliation or pond sand.
I remember also a bitter letter to the editor in reply that we were headed towards a "super airplane" division or something like of 64 or so teams or so which seems remarkably like the present alignment of P5 and other schools.
Say instead a Saban promoting P5 against P5 competition you had all the G5 schools opting off the football schedules of P5 schools including bowl games. No telling the rules of competition that that the NCAA would have to adopt to give some movement to the bottom half of each conference. And how many bowls would sponsors fund for participation by the P5 schools only?
I think the P5 - G5 issue should be resolved with relegtion and promotion of the bottom and top teams but its hard to see that the top dogs would agree and of course there would be a scramble to reschedule OOC games each season.
We are in this situation because the most successful programs wanted a bigger share of the TV revenue and to cut their own deals. Maybe that is right. But it is has made for a very different Saturday's America than when Dutch Meyer uttered the words that became the title of the book by Jenkins and the changes are not over.