See, this is why my plan is good -- it's more comprehensive than other playoff suggestions. It incorporates details, as well as other important aspects of whether something like this could happen or not. We've got uniformity across all the leagues and teams in the country. Scheduling will be no different. Here are my suggestions.
An 11-game schedule. Might be able to go with 12 here, but 11 is better to accommodate the playoff. And it kind of makes all the complaining about too many games, not enough time for class, etc., hollow. Each team will play 9 conference games and 2 non-conference games.
I understand that with 9 conference games, there will be an advantage to the teams who get 5 home games. Following with the general theme here, why should this be arbitrary? Why not have the best, most-deserving teams, get the extra home conference game. Makes sense, right?
Here's how this will work:
- The top 5 finishing teams from the previous season get 5 home games; the bottom 5 get 4 home games.
- If conference teams play traditional neutral-site games (Texas/Oklahoma, Army/Navy, Florida/Georgia, Kansas/Missouri, etc.), each of those team will get 4 home and 4 away games.
- For scheduling purposes, the automatically promoted team "replaces" the relegated (10th-place) team; if the 1st tier team wins the playoff game, nothing changes; if the 2nd tier team wins, it becomes the 10th place team and the automatically promoted team is 9th place. This is really only important for figuring out which home game gets replaced, if applicable.
- Teams will alternate home and away games against one another within a conference, with "replacement" happening as outlined above.
- If teams placed 1-5 are scheduled to have 5 away games, they will get another home game by means of: the top ranked remaining team with 5 away games will become the home team against the top ranked team placed 6-10 still scheduled to have 5 home games. This will be repeated until all teams have the appropriate number of home games, based on previous year's finish.
One last note: all regular season games will be played by Thanksgiving weekend. The relegation playoff games, played in lieu of the current conference championship games (but there will be 6 of them, instead of the current 5), will be the same weekend -- first weekend of December.
I think your system is very interesting, but I have a question... the two OOC games, would they just be between big/big and little/little or could teams schedule big vs. little? Just wondering.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteOOC would work pretty much as it does now -- that teams can schedule whoever they want, for whatever reasons they want. If they want to challenge themselves and get BCS points (for seeding), that's fine. If they want a payday or to play a scrub for an easy win and to get their depth experience, that'd be fine too. One thing to keep in mind is that -- let's say for the sake of argument Michigan got relegated out of the Big 10 1st division -- Michigan/Ohio St. would then become a non-conference game and have to be scheduled as such. It'd also be a problem for schools like Notre Dame to schedule with traditional rivals like USC, Michigan, etc.
It'd probably be tougher to secure non-conference games years in advance for such reasons.
Thanks for reading.