I've always thought that superconferences suck. They don't have the cohesion and frequency of play as smaller conferences. In my opinion the ideal conference size is 9, because then you can play full round robin in football and full double round robin in basketball.
12 is the absolute maximum. In a 12 team league with two six-team divisions and one protected rivalry, you'll play every team in the other division that isn't your protected rival twice every 5 years. That's really pushing it. If a hypothetical college student can get through his whole standard four years in school withoug his football team playing another football during that whole time, they aren't really in the same conference in my opinion.
Now the ACC, Big Ten, and SEC are going to 14 teams. In a 14 team league with two divisions and one protected rivalry, you'll play each non-protected rival in the other division twice every six years. That sucks. That's not a conference. Not to mention how messy basketball gets.
The decision makers don't care
That said, the train has already left the station. We are headed toward superconferences. The reason we are headed that way is because of TV money. The university presidents and boards of trustees couldn't care less about the fan considerations I listed above. So we have to find a way to make these unwieldy leagues work.
The solution
Ironically, the solution to this problem is to grow bigger. That sounds conterintuitive, but hear me out there.
For football: 16 teams divided into four quadrants. 9 game conference schedule. Every two years the quadrants rotate like this:
- Quadrant A and Quadrant B form one division, and Quadrant C and Quadrant D form the other division.
- Two years later, the divisions change to AC and BD.
- Two years later... lather, rinse repeat.
- Also, each quadrant plays two teams from the quadrant it will never be paired with, rotating every two years. So for example, quadrant A plays two teams out of quadrant D in years 1 and 2, then the other two teams out of quadrant D in years 3 and 4
If you do the math, you see that everyone plays everyone else at least twice every four years. That's as close to ideal as a superconference will get.
What about protected rivalries? There are no protected rivalries. You design the quadrants properly, so that important rivalries are within the same quandrant. Yes that means that important rivals will never play each other in the league championship game... but really, how often has that actually happened in the real world with today's league setups?
You may also ask.. .wait, didn't the WAC try this and fail? Yes they did, in the 1990s. But they didn't fail because of the quadrants. They failed because they diluted their product with inferior teams, plus they had teams that were as far as 3900 miles apart making travel costs prohibitive for a relatively low-revenue league. I don't think a 16 team SEC, Big Ten, ACC, or Big 12 would have those problems.
Plus one more thing: the quadrants looked awkward in the 1990s because they were being compared with 9, 10, and 12 team leagues. Now the point of comparison is 14 team leagues, which are awful. Against 14 team leagues, quadrants look pretty cohesive.
What about basketball?
OK, since I"m an ACC fan I guess this needs to be addressed. The biggest problem with today's ACC and other superconferences is the unbalanced schedule. With the 16 team league, you actually solve that problem. Simply play a 16 team league schedule, with a full single round robin plus ONE protected rival that you play home and home. So in the ACC for example those protected rivals would be pairs like Duke-UNC, UVA-VT, GT-Clemson, Miami-FSU, NCSU-Wake, etc. It's much more balanced than the 14 team setup with 18 league games that the ACC is contemplating, where each team has ten one-play rivals and 4 two-play rivals (one of which is constant and three of which rotate), resulting in some schedules being much easier than others.
And by the way, the Big East has shown that a 16 team basketball league can be pretty damn good.
