WEEKLY WHINE

Minimum disruption, maximum excitement

The 2010 collegiate American football season is approaching its end. The GoobNet Special Projects Enhancement and Enforcement Division [SPEED] is therefore taking the opportunity to examine the season’s results and determine how to arrange teams into our plan for promotion and relegation in the sport.

As you are well aware, the teams will be arranged into five divisions. The first four contain 128 teams each, the fifth 235. The first four divisions are each split into sixteen conferences of eight teams each. The First Division will begin play next year with the 120 teams that played in NCAA Division I-A this year plus the eight teams that reached last weekend’s quarterfinals of the NCAA Division I-AA tournament: Appalachian State, Villanova, North Dakota State, Eastern Washington, Georgia Southern, Wofford, Delaware, and New Hampshire.

The selected approach for creating conferences in the new divisions was the Minimum Disruption proposal, which creates regionally sensible conferences in the fewest number of moves. First, for your reference, here is the current conference structure for NCAA Division I-A.

In addition to the moves proposed previously, here we further propose that South Florida move from the Big East Conference to the Sun Belt Conference. The available slots in the First Division are therefore filled by placing Appalachian State in the Southeast Conference, Delaware in the Coastal Conference, Eastern Washington in the Mountain West Conference, Georgia Southern in the Gulf Conference, New Hampshire in the Big East Conference, North Dakota State in the Midwest Conference, Villanova in the Atlantic Conference, and Wofford in the South Central Conference.

So who do you think will win each of these conferences? And are you excited for the first ever playoff in the highest division of collegiate American football? We are eagerly anticipating Boise State’s thrilling run to the 2012 championship game in New Orleans and their meeting with shock Southeast Conference champions Appalachian State. In addition, you should also look forward to the 2011 GoobNet Silly Bowl between Nevada Las Vegas and Bowling Green, to be played in Sunny Isles Beach, FL, USA. We are currently in discussions with the city on building a stadium. As we told them in last week’s board meeting, they’ll have plenty of room if they just tear down that huge eyesore that is the Coastal Towers.