One of the single greatest aspects of College Football - that no other league has - is that every single game matters. Only in college football can you honestly say that EVERY. GAME. MATTERS.
Except... the CFB powers have been making dumber and dumber decisions that have caused some games to matter less. Yuck. There are three keys to both returning CFB to it's former glory and to ushering it into an even brighter future where every single game really matters! 1. Conference Championships as round 1 of the Playoffs, 2. Bragging Rights and 3. Relegation.
CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIPS as ROUND 1 of the PLAYOFFS:
In our new conferences that make sense... the 2 best teams play each other for the championship. Not the best Atlantic team and the best Coastal Team... or East and West... or North and South. Just the best 2 teams. And winning that conference championship matters because the 4 Conference Championships are the first round of the playoffs. No more losing a conference championship and still making the playoff. No matter missing your conference championship but leapfrogging into the playoffs anyway. Just four evenly balanced conferences and four conference champions who play each other in the second round of the playoffs. To learn more about how we can make a CFB Post-Season that is truly great, click below:
BRAGGING RIGHTS GAMES:
Bragging Rights Games is a fun title for a serious concept. Conference superiority matters and it should be rewarded. As part of the standardized scheduling formula, teams from different conferences will all play each other in a standardized way (i.e. the 4th seeded teams in each conference from the previous season will be paired up in the following season). The conference that wins the most Bragging Rights inter-conference games will receive a major financial bonus at the end of the season to be shared between all it's affiliate teams! Non-playoff bowl games will also be Bragging Rights games so that no bowl games are meaningless anymore. Neat, huh?
To learn more about how Bragging Rights Games will effect the normal schedule, click below:
RELEGATION:
College Football is begging for relegation. The 2017 UCF Knights are begging for relegation. The 2021 Cincinnati Bearcats deserve relegation. So what is relegation? In general, it's the concept that the worst performing teams in an upper league or division move down to a lower division and the best performing teams in the lower league or division move up to the higher one.
Specifically for college football, here's how we make it work so that EVERY. GAME. MATTERS.
At the end of the season, the two worst performing teams in every Conference Upper Division will be seeded against the two best performing teams in the same Conference's Lower Division (See the illustration below). These Relegation Bowl Games will determine whether a team gets to remain in the Upper Division or whether they are relegated to the lower division.
As a purely hypothetical example for illustration purposes, this is what the Relegation Bowl Games would have looked like in the Mid-East Conference last season:
In summary, Better Conference Championships that lead straight into the playoffs, Bragging Rights Games and Relegation Bowl Games contribute with very real stakes to every single CFB game mattering in a way they never have before.