WEEKLY WHINE

Increased ARRRGH! in collegiate American football

The collegiate American football season is nearly upon us. However, the season as currently scheduled is wrong. It is, as usual, up to those of us here at GoobNet to fix the problem.

Last year, the GoobNet Agency for Reintroducing Relegation to Recreational Game Hierarchies presented its plan for bringing promotion and relegation to collegiate American football. As an added bonus, the plan also establishes a playoff tournament for the First Division. Here, we show exactly how this plan is to be implemented for the 2011 season.

First, we remind you that under our plan, the 731 members of the NCAA and NAIA that have American football programmes are rearranged into five divisions. The first three divisions roughly correspond to NCAA Division I-A, I-AA, and II respectively. Teams currently in Division III are split roughly evenly between the Fourth and Fifth Divisions, and the NAIA teams also join the Fifth Division. We therefore end up with 128 teams in each of the First through Fourth Divisions and 219 teams in the Fifth Division. Here we are including four schools that are starting or restarting their American football programmes: Mercer, South Alabama, Texas-San Antonio, and Sienna Heights.

Each division is split into sixteen conferences. In the First through Fourth Divisions, this of course gives us eight teams in each conference. In the Fifth Division, we have either thirteen or fourteen teams in each conference, and the conferences are themselves subdivided into two sections.

Here is the list of conferences that will participate in the 2011 season. They are grouped into sixteen regions; the promotion and relegation playoffs at the end of the season will be between conferences in the same region. We have also shown which US states [or districts, or Canadian provinces] are represented in each conference, as well as the previously existing conference, if any, the conference descends from.

To decide which teams would be allocated to which divisions, we looked at two criteria: the teams’ actual performance in the 2010 season, and the mathematical Massey Ratings for 2010. In cases where a limited number of teams needed to be selected, for instance the eight DI-AA teams to be promoted to the First Division, we simply selected the eight quarterfinalists of the 2010 DI-AA playoffs, as described previously. Otherwise, we looked primarily to the Massey Ratings for relative comparisons between conferences.

Having placed the teams into divisions, we then allocated them to conferences. We kept the same principles as the Minimum Disruption proposal that we used for the First Division, in which we tried to create geographically compact groupings in the fewest possible moves. We have also repaired some of the errors that were introduced in the previous system, such as the egregious blunder that led to the University of San Diego participating in the Pioneer Football League.

As should be plainly obvious, this arrangement is far superior than what the NCAA and NAIA are currently implementing, and it will result in a much more exciting season. You will no doubt be eager to see the first promotion playoffs, in which Dartmouth is sure to defeat New Hampshire, who had only just been promoted into the First Division. These and many other thrilling moments will be yours to see, if the price is right.

The price, of course, being the NCAA and its member institutions having to put their profit motive aside in order to establish the higher priority of organising a sporting competition. We have no doubt that they will be willing to do this. After all, what is more important to them, the integrity of the tournaments that they organise and the way they influence our next generation of leaders, or a quick buck?