We’re still talking about realignment!
gtbadcarma: There is talk of Cal and Stanford possibly entering the ACC. Does this make any kind of sense to you? Would this not basically be a money loser for most schools considering the high cost of travel and low sidewalk fan attraction?
Ben: You know, I used to joke about The Coastal Conference as a merger of the ACC and Pac-12, but I certainly never actually thought it would happen. Truly, I think it’s actually a pretty awful idea. If you want to grow the conference, there are plenty of teams in the AAC or Sun Belt who could probably move up to the next level and not have ridiculous travel costs.
Jack: Travel per school usually only goes as far as $1.2-$1.5M per year. Now of course, no school is having to regularly travel cross country for their conference games, so who knows what that number could balloon to. Plainly, the whole thing doesn’t make sense at all. If you ignore all the other relevant factors, knowing GT would potentially have conference games with Cal and Stanford is a little exciting for me, notably because adding Stanford immediately increases our strenght of schedule in most of our non-revenue sports.
Bill Brockman: Will the new continent spanning conferences lead to non-revenue sports being dropped as travel costs skyrocket? At the very best, I imagine travel squad sizes will drop, leaving less incentive for the bench players to participate. It’s all very sad.
Ben: Although I hope that is not the outcome, I fear that it is a possible outcome. The alternative would be for schools to have different conference memberships dependent on the sport, but that sounds like a logistical nightmare.
Jack: Back to my previous point, for the schools that are travelling cross country, monetary travel costs won’t be the factor here. It’s the physical toll the student athletes will take. Cross country travel is already hard enough on professional athletes who’s job it is to be in the best physical shape possible. They don’t have classes waiting for them, but the kids at UCLA, Michigan, Washington, and everywhere else do. The nightmare for me is that kids who want to play college sports will either completely quit their sport or choose not to play if they know student life won’t be feasible for them with the travel.
Submitted via email: If you could pick a point in time in college football and live there forever, considering both conference alignment and postseason rules, when would that be and why?
I’ll have to agree with the writer: death of BCS, start of Playoff, stable/regional conferences.
Ben: Personally, I think the BCS is over-hated. Was it perfect? No, but (and this is a hot take), I think it did a better job of consistently picking the two best teams for the national championship than the CFP.
Jack: I don’t feel like I’ve been alive long enough to properly answer this question.