College Football Relegation Week: The Case For Cannibalism

So it’s time to take stock of where we stand after seven seasons of promotion and relegation. Some teams (Boise State, Cal Poly, Central Florida, Elon, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota State, TCU, Tulsa) have taken full advantage of the opportunities at their disposal and improved their respective lots in life. Others were simply (and predictably) unable to keep up. When your team sees a sudden collapse, like Boston College did in 2011, for instance, the repercussions are significant.

And, of course, this year Missouri and Texas A&M join the SEC. Real life continues to interfere.

Thus far in Relegation Week, we have explained to you the concept of promotion-and-relegation, we have discussed how it would or wouldn’t work for college football, and we have laid out all of the college football universe into relegation-based tiers. Now it’s time to find out what this structure would actually mean for college football’s balance of power.

The question for today’s series of posts is simple: What if college football had already adopted a promotion-and-relegation system starting in, say, 2005? What would the universe look like a few years later? How much of an impact would this actually have on how we follow college football (and who we follow)?

Not only is there a very good argument to be made for a relegation system in all sports, but especially ones with sprawling leagues at various tiers, there’s also a very strong case against college football’s current league management setup.

(Basically, there isn’t a setup. We can’t even figure out who’s in charge of Florida State realignment, let alone college football realignment.)

The English Premiere League may not play the best soccer in the world, but they do play the most Michael Bay soccer in the world. This movie, year in and year out, is rigged to explode, and usually with multiple diabolical charges planted directly beneath important protagonists’ tender parts. (And just like a Michael Bay movie, no one important ever really dies in all the fire, but more on that in a bit.)

Take the final day of the EPL season on Sunday, an emotional turn through the colon of Satan himself for anyone invested in the outcomes of the games, and a delightful “Ten Little Indians” scenario for anyone else who happened to watch. Man City would win the title, but only after nearly coughing up the title on goal differential to crosstown rivals Manchester United when City went down 2 to 1 to Queen’s Park Rangers, a not-very-good team with very good motivation to play kamikaze to Man City’s championship hopes.