What if Wednesday's: Changes in College Football Alignment & Scheduling

At some point in our lifetime there will be a time when the NCAA will no longer be able to keep their vice grip on the Power Five Conferences. The ACC recently announced that they are launching their new network to go along with the other conferences already running conference networks. It’s only a matter of time before the College Football Playoffs expand to eight teams and with the amount of revenue that college football is capable of producing, the Power Five is going to get fed up with the NCAA regulating how the bell cows can and cannot spend their money. The NCAA’s inconsistency, investigation failures and lack of true leadership will prove to be the straws that break the camel’s back.

When it does, the Power Five are going to need a system to replace the cupcake games they schedule. Those teams aren’t going to be available to play because they’ll most likely stay back in the NCAA. To fill in the weeks outside of conference games the Power Five conferences might look overseas for a system to fill in the gaps and double down on the playoff system that can generate even more revenue, drama and intrigue.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Champions League in the European club soccer circuit, without going deep into specifics here’s how it works: the top club leagues between almost all of the European countries send top clubs as representatives to Champions league matchups who compete in a season long knockout tournament. The number of clubs that come out of each country vary depending the league’s performance the year before - but countries like England, Spain, Italy and Germany almost always send the top four teams. Champions League starts out in Group Play, like what you’re used to in World Cup competition, with 32 teams fighting to advance to the knockout stage (a 16 team tournament).

There are some adjustments and fine tuning for this transition to take place - first off, Champions League is played outside of club play, usually on weekday nights ahead of the club competition on the weekends. That can’t translate to football, to fix this, we have to scale back the amount of teams - eliminate the group play and start immediately in the knockout stage. If we take the top three teams from each of the Power Five’s we have a fifteen team bracket. To make a better example of this, we’ll use last season’s results as if next season is the College Football Champions League.

Representing each conference:

SEC: Alabama, Florida and Ole Miss

Pac 12: Stanford, USC and Oregon

Big 12: Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and TCU

Big 10: Ohio State, Iowa and Michigan State

ACC: Clemson, Florida State and North Carolina

Using the teams from the conference standings above, I seeded the teams based on the final AP College Football rankings (because the playoff rankings don’t update after the season). Here’s how it fits in between regular season conference games: the right side of the bracket plays their first round games week one, and the left side plays their first round games week two. Could you imagine those first two weekends of college football? They’ve done a great job with providing us with a solid first week this season, but can you imagine that weekend with a couple more marquee game and then doubled up for the following weekend? It would be insane. After the first round, the quarterfinals could take place three or four weeks after so the teams can play three to four conference games in between. After the quarterfinals, another four weeks before the semifinals, and then the finals get during that dead period of college football in December. This system isn’t intended to replace the College Football Playoffs, because personally I really like the system and I can’t wait for the playoffs to expand. This Champions League model isn’t likely to integrate into College Football anytime soon - but it’s an interesting concept and an exotic idea to kickoff “What if Wednesday’s.”