BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

Not likely. It'll end up being an exclave of another confederation. Like the Texas Republic Big 12 Alliance.

 

The bigger issue here may well be the big boys seceeding from the NCAA. Start their own football playoff. Start their own basketball tournament and offer it to the highest bidder. No more George Masons, Butlers and Boise States of the world nipping at your heels. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.

 

That hasn't happened because those big athletic departments prefer to keep their tax exemptions and don't particularly want to face anti-trust charges.

 

That, and boosters want their teams to win eight football games and 20 basketball seasons each season. Take out all of those "______s of the world not named VCU, Butler and Davidson", and the winning records go away.

 

They could still schedule those teams as non-conference games, same as now. There will always be someone smaller than you to beat up on.

 

The NCAA would forbid it. Fuhrer Emmert would make sure that happened in, oh, about 16 seconds.

 

Why is Emmert a dictator? Who hires him?

 

Not likely.

If the SEC-ACC-Big 12-Big 10-Pac-12 join forces and "break a way", they won't be filling their schedules with smaller schools. NCAA won't allow it. The remaining NCAA schools would survive without them.

Not sure, schedule wise, the breakaway pack would have it so much better. Especially for non-revenue sports. Or basketball in general. Football is ok making up a schedule when you have 60-plus teams to choose from and you only play once a week.

A lot harder in basketball, baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball.

And for a football programs like Kentucky, Vandy, Wake Forest and Duke, good luck with the winning seasons when EVERY game is against a name program.

 

Wasn't it Nick Saban earlier this year who suggested there should only be 60-70 schools in the top tier and they shouldn't play anyone outside that tier.... almost like a minor-league NFL?

That's sort of what I am envisioning down the road. Why risk a home loss to a MAC school (are you listening, Iowa Hawkeyes?) when you can go schedule Kentucky or Colorado instead?

My understanding is that the whole reason Division I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) was created was to address the inequities that existed between major and "mid-major" schools. Fine, I get that. I enjoyed covering FCS football.

The problem, IMO, is that there are too many fringe schools fancying themselves in the top tier. Ditto for basketball, although obviously in basketball one or two players can make a greater impact.

 

If the 64 programs in the ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12 get together and decide, yeah we should seriously consider breaking from the NCAA and forming our own association, there are going to be legal and bureaucratic hurdles to clear. Legislators and boards of regents, trustees, curators, etc. are going to want to have their say.

Let's say Virginia and Virginia Tech want to leave the NCAA and join their peers in the new association, the state government probably isn't going to sit back and let those two screw over VCU, Radford, JMU, George Mason, ODU, etc. There was a lot of buzz about the Kansas Board of Regents not allowing KU and K-State to split up during conference realignment, I doubt that group is interested the big schools essentially pushing Wichita State to NAIA status. Those kinds of issues would come up in a lot of states.

 

Sure there will be challenges, there always are. I just think the upsides (money) would eventually prevail. It would similar to the split from Division I to I-AA in football. Really doesn't matter to me, though. We'll see.

 

The money is a wash at best if: (A.) Athletic Departments lose their tax-exempt status. (B.) There are legal fees from lawsuits and anti-trust charges and (C.) Money from the state governments dries up because legislators and voters are angry the "smaller" schools (using the term lightly because institutions such as South Florida, the various UC/Cal-State campuses, BYU James Madison, etc. aren't exactly small schools) get left behind.