College Football Playoff expansion isn’t the answer to fix college football, but relegation is

College Football Playoff expansion sounds good, but it isn’t a solution to the power and resource imbalance between the Group of Five and the Power Five. Relegation fixes that.

The 2020 college football season was a weird one. We saw Notre Dame in a conference, a wide receiver win the Heisman, and absolutely no MACtion. Despite all of that, one thing remained a certainty: there is no way the College Football Playoff committee was going to put a Group of Five team into the Playoff. No way. No how.

The answer to this, for many, is to expand the Playoff field to six or eight or 10 or maybe 12. 16 could work. But what about 84? Or go FA cup and any group of 11 college-eligible players can put together a squad. Let’s let Mount Union line up across from Cincinnati in the early rounds and see what happens.

But what does that solve? Sure, it means maybe one or two G5 gets to play among the big boys (Power Five) in an eight-team playoff. If it’s a 12 or 16 team playoff, we could say each conference champ gets in, and then the committee decides on two to six wildcard teams to fill out the bracket.

Great. Now everyone gets a shot to play for a title, an unfair lottery ticket that maybe, on the day your team plays them, the best the Power Five team slips up. That’s not a real path forward for the Cincinnatis and Coastal Carolinas of the world. Sure, the Chanticleers (look it up!) had one of the most innovative offenses of 2020, and the Bearcats had a legitimate case to get in over, say, Notre Dame in 2020. And they hung with Georgia! But does anyone think they’re beating Ohio State, let alone Alabama?

Playoff expansion gives more teams a lottery ticket. And that’s only if expansion goes beyond six to eight or even 10. What if the ticket doesn’t hit? You got your one shot, back to work at your nine to Group of Five.

Instead of this “every few years, we’ll let you sit at the cool kids table” system of Playoff expansion, what the FBS needs is a relegation system. It’s the only way to give excellent G5 teams a shot at being great Power Five programs.

How to make relegation and promotion work

Relegation starts by creating a Group of Five National Championship, separate from the current CFP National Championship. The playoff committee settles in and picks the four most deserving Group of Five teams to play in the G5CFP. They get their own trophy. No asterisks. No consolation tournament. A real deal shiny gold trophy.

Right off the bat, this solves two of the biggest issues with the current layout: representation and a real chance at winning.

It might seem a little off-putting to put a name on it, but frankly, that’s the only thing this distinction has really lacked. The rewards for Power Five conferences are so much richer than the Group of Five in nearly every respect (more on that later). We’re taking an unwritten reality – one that was really driven home when Notre Dame went to the CFP in 2020 – and giving it a name.

The winner of the G5CFP is promoted to the nearest geographical Power Five conference. So, let’s say for the sake of argument, Eastern Michigan wins the G5CFP. Their nearest Power Five is the Big Ten, so into the Big Ten they go.

But we can’t just promote the winner. No, there also needs to be relegation, to keep things balanced. The worst team, record-wise, in the Power Five conference to which a Group of Five team is promoted gets dropped down to the Group of Five conference. In the Eastern Michigan example, the worst team in the Big Ten drops down to the MAC.

Since there are necessarily some disadvantages to facing stiffer competition, promoted teams are immune from relegation for four years after their promotion. That will (hopefully) give them a chance to reap some of the benefits of being in a more prestigious conference and build the program.

Some programs are in regions that overlap with two or more Power Five conferences. For example, Coastal Carolina finds itself well within both the ACC and SEC regions. In that case, Coastal, should they win the G5CFP would go to the weakest of the two conferences – forever and always the ACC. It’s a move that doesn’t excessively hamper the promoted team while also making the worse of the two conferences better.

Giving Group of Five teams a way up

It isn’t particularly controversial to say that the Group of Five is in the second tier of the FBS. Television deals are less lucrative, the bowl tie-ins less prestigious, and the shared revenue pools smaller.

And when a team in the Group of Five has its season of seasons, what does it get? A New Years Six bid and a matchup with the second or third best team from a Power Five. It’s a one-off consolation prize, and one that will probably get your head coach snatched up.

Let’s look at each of the Group of Five representatives since the start of the CFP system:

• 2014: Boise State, beat Arizona, HC Bryan Harsin left for Auburn after 2020 season.
• 2015: Houston, beat Florida State, HC Tom Herman left for Texas after 2016 season.
• 2016: Western Michigan, lost to Wisconsin, HC P.J. Fleck left for Minnesota after 2016 season.
• 2017: UCF, beat Auburn, HC Scott Frost left for Nebraska after 2017 season.
• 2018: UCF, lost to LSU, HC Josh Heupel left for Tennessee after 2020 season.
• 2019: Memphis, lost to Penn State, HC Mike Norvell left before the Cotton Bowl.
• 2020: Cincinnati, lost to Georgia, HC Luke Fickell still home. For now.

If you’re a G5 team, and you make it to the New Years’ Six, you can kiss your coach goodbye. And usually within two years. Who knows what’s in the water in Boise that makes their coaches stay so long, but considering Chris Petersen stayed so long (seven years!), Bryan Harsin waiting until 2020 to jump ship doesn’t seem so unusual.

A lot of that has to do with resources. The big boys can pay more, and they can recruit better. The prestige of their own TV deals and major conference attention is a big, big draw for recruits. Imagine being Cincinnati in 2018, having the best recruiting class in the AAC, and getting out-recruited by 2-10 Arkansas.

Yikes.

And it’s not just Cincinnati. Originally, this is where we would see how valuable to recruiting it is to be from a Power Five school. There was going to be a comparison of like-record teams and seeing how their 247 composite scores stacked up. You can go even deeper and control for more than just team record over the prior few years, adjusting for team location and program stability and so on and so on. But the ugly truth is that it’s not even close.

Here are the highest-rated Group of Five teams in each every year since the start of the CFP:

• 2014: USF (42, despite being 4-8, Willie Taggert is a recruiting wiz) – outrecruited by 4-8 Texas Tech (oh, hey Patrick Mahomes) and the next best team was Marshall (62), coming off of a 13-1 season.
• 2015: Boise State (58, after a 9-4 season, although they’re a household name at this point) – couldn’t even outrecruit Rutgers (56).
• 2016: Houston (36, my stars!) – but that top 40 finish is sandwiched between an 89th and a 69th place finish. They were finishing a 9-4 season after going 13-1 the year prior.
• 2017: UCF (55, the famous “National Championship” season) – seriously though
• 2018: Cincinnati (49)
• 2019: Boise State (54)
• 2020: Boise State (65)

Yes, recruiting is a multi-year process, and good records one season might not yield immediate dividends for the program. However, the G5 as a whole cannot put a team in the top 50 with any regularity. That really drives home the lottery ticket nature of making it to the New Years’ Six, doesn’t it?

One-off shots at ruining a Power Five’s postseason might be nice, but it’s not a stable path for a mid-major program. Make it to the New Years’ Six and you’re likely to lose your stability at head coach without much in the way of return.

Straight cash, homie

While we’re talking about the advantages of the Power Five, there’s nothing quite like the financial benefits of being in a Power Five conference. It’s the man behind the curtain that the NCAA doesn’t want us to see. Except there’s no real curtain. It’s more like a guy in one of those prop nose-and-glasses things. It’s like Superman’s disguised as Clark Kent. Sure, the NCAA is a nonprofit. But it’s also a billion-dollar industry with low costs of labor. We know it’s you, Clark.

One of the nice things about nonprofits is that they are required by the IRS to file Forms 990 each and every year. So if we wanted to know exactly how financially lucrative being in the ACC compared to the AAC is, we don’t have to guess. The IRS makes the conferences tell us.

In 2018, the most recent year available on the invaluable GuideStar database, full members of the AAC (so excluding UCONN, Navy, and Wichita State) made between $3.3 and $7.4 million from the conference. Our oh look, they’re trying ACC schools made north of $27 million from the conference (excluding Notre Dame, of course).

The conference with the smallest payouts to its members is the Mountain West, none of which’s members receive more than $1 million, which makes Boise State’s national relevance all the more impressive.

Meanwhile, the conference with the highest financial distribution is the MAC, which pays out… just kidding. It’s the Big Ten. Lot’s of old legacy money kicking around the Big Ten. You wouldn’t know it now, but Michigan used to be a good program. Some of its alums think it still is, or should be, or would be if not for myriad reasons.

Yes, these distributions include all other sports in each of these conferences. So when you see that Arizona made a little more than $32 million from the Pac 12, that isn’t just football. Since relegation would only apply to football, we would need to know for sure how much money we are talking about. Luckily, Notre Dame and the ACC give us a good comparison.

If we take the minimum payout for others schools in the conference, it’s about $27 million. Notre Dame made just under $7 million for all of its other sports besides football. That would be huge for a school like UCF, which in 2018 received about $7.5 million from the AAC. If, like the ACC, about 75 percent of that is for football, the Knights would be moving from $5.5 million to $20 million, just in the ACC.

The financial disparities are obvious, well known, and in some cases probably a reason for the coaching brain-drain from mid-major schools to the big guys. The Group of Five schools have no real shot at building a program under the current system. The closest thing we’ve seen is Boise State, and even then, it’s never going to last forever.

(Here’s another thing, when a coach changes teams, he has to reinstall his program, both on the field and on the recruiting trails. If he can change to a better situation without needing to rebuild anything, say, by staying with his school while getting a huge pay bonus and recruiting selling point, we might see more programs without a long legacy winning, like Clemson, burst on the to scene. It can’t possibly be less likely than it is now.)

What would this have meant?

Here is a fun exercise we can do. Let’s say the relegation plan was in place during the last four years. What would the college football landscape look like now?

Let’s go year by year and find out.

2017

In 2017, UCF beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl, capping an undefeated season that got Scott Frost hired to his alma mater, Nebraska. Let’s assume that this UCF team that was good enough to beat the number 7 team in the country was also good enough to beat the next best G5 team, Memphis, who they beat twice already that year.

Fantastic, now UCF graduates to the nearest Power Five conference. It falls in the same region as the ACC and the SEC. Because in 2017, the ACC was worse than the SEC, UCF moves to the ACC and replaces its worst team. Sorry, UNC, you’re now competing in the AAC for football.

That move probably doesn’t keep Scott Frost at UCF, but the next man up Josh Heupel gets to lead an ACC team with ACC money, which we estimated above to be around $15 million more than in the AAC. Does UCF being in the ACC and that money make it more attractive than Tennessee? Who knows, but it’s a lot closer than it is now.

Also, here’s a fun thought: does Mac Jones come back to a G5 UNC? Maybe, maybe not, but it does seem like he could probably get them back to the Power Five with this current team, doesn’t it?

2018

This one’s tricky because UCF, our newest member of the ACC football group, was the Group of Five representative in the New Years’ Six in 2018. So let’s go down the list and try to see who would have taken the crown, but for the Knights. We have two contenders in Fresno State and Boise State, both of whom the CFP Committee had ranked in the 20s. Let’s say their rankings are an accurate evaluation (if you like a more statistical approach, Football Outsiders liked Fresno State more too).

So we have Fresno State advancing to the Pac 12. They go from the laughably small payout (less than $600,000!) from the Mountain West to the hefty payouts of the Pac 12. If, like the ACC, about 75 percent of Pac 12 distribution is football-related (a dangerous assumption, yes), then the Bulldogs are looking at around $24 million for being the best Group of Five team in 2018.

Who drops down, then? That falls to the Oregon State. The Beavers would find themselves in the Mountain West, and probably not doing a whole lot better than they are now.

2019

The Memphis Tigers were the Group of Five team in the New Years’ Six game. Our Group of Five champion sets its sights on the vaunted SEC. Tennessee already has two SEC schools – Tennessee and Vanderbilt – and the ACC has none, which makes it SEC country (even though Louisville and Notre Dame are in the general area).

The Tigers get to see their Conference distributions jump from maybe $3.5 million to potentially $33 million by dropping Arkansas down to Group of Five status. There’s a bit of an issue with the Tigers being the SEC West, given both Tennessee and Vanderbilt are in the East, but the geography of the conference is strange as it is. Memphis would be further West than both Mississippi schools, so this isn’t a terrible fit. Just unfortunate to jump into the toughest division in college football.

Now, yes, Mike Norvell bolted for Florida State before the Cotton Bowl. But come on. Would you honestly leave Memphis in the SEC to take over this Florida State team? The path forward at Florida State might be easier, but only slightly. Nick Saban is going to retire before Dabo Swinney does (probably), and Auburn just fired a head coach whose only sin was not being able to beat Nick Saban.

2020

Now we get to the biggest if-not-now-when Group of Five team we have ever seen. Cincinnati was the best Group of Five team by a wide margin in the bizarre 2020 season. (Although, with a Group of Five playoff, we would have had the chance to see Coastal Carolina play Cincinnati. Man that would be fun.) The Bearcats went 9-0 in the regular season and let a win slip away against Georgia in the Peach Bowl.

Cincinnati’s conference payout would jump from around $4.5 million in the AAC to north of $40 million in the most lucrative conference in college sports, the Big Ten. Illinois, on the other hand, has to drop down to the AAC.

Taking it all together

Let’s review. Here are the rules for relegation:

1. The Group of Five has its own College Football Playoff, with its own National Champion
2. The National Champion is promoted to the Power Five conference nearest its geographical region
3. The Power Five team with the worst record in the Group of Five’s Champion’s new conference is relegated to the Group of Five conference from whence the Champion came
4. The new Power Five member is granted a four-year exemption from relegation to adjust to new competition levels and recruiting advantages.

This is a real path forward for Group of Five teams. An expanded playoff sounds nice. Everyone gets to an outside shot at a title, but it’s not going to lead to better teams in the long run. A relegation style system makes the best football conferences better while giving teams from the outsider groups a chance to join the elite without relying on a landscape-shattering realignment.

A four-year relegation immunity adds additional stability, but it probably would not be necessary. Of all the teams that were Group of Five representatives in New Years’ Six bowl games, the only ones that would be in danger of relegation seem to be Western Michigan. P.J. Fleck might have stuck around, but that season was lightning in a bottle. Houston with Tom Herman still at the helm in the Big 12 does fine, maybe even better than he did at Texas. Boise State in the Pac 12 probably still has their head coach and might compete for a title.

The reality, though, is that while school athletic departments like to play the role of nonprofit, a scheme like this will be shot down by the bad teams in the Power Five. Arkansas in 2018 received more than $44 million from the SEC. They haven’t had a winning season since 2016 and haven’t been ranked since Bobby Petrino was riding motorcycles. If there is a chance that cash flow might dry up, you can expect the Arkansas and Wake Forests and Kansas of the world to fight tooth and nail to keep it.

As fans, though, we deserve better. An expanded playoff won’t give us better games. It won’t really increase the odds of David winning a championship. Instead, we’ll be stuck watching the Sun Belt winner get its head kicked in by the SEC until the Power Five schools are playing each other in the final four, just as it is now.

A Group of Five playoff with promotion and relegation will give us what we want when we’re asking for an expanded playoff: a real chance for the little guy to win it all.

Now let’s maybe see if we can’t toss some of those duffle bags full cash to the players.

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