I made some changes to 6 BCS conferences added 6 teams to the BCS schools already in place plus put ND in a conference. Here it goes:

ACC
North
Duke
North Carolina
North Carolina State
Virginia
Virginia Tech
Wake Forest
South
Clemson
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami
South Carolina
South Florida

Big 12
North
Arkansas
Colorado
Kansas
Kansas State
Missouri
Nebraska
South
Baylor
Oklahoma
Oklahoma State
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Tech

Big East
East
Army
Boston College
Connecticut
Navy
Rutgers
Syracuse
West
Cincinnati
Maryland
Penn State
Pittsburgh
Temple
West Virginia

Big Ten
East
Indiana
Michigan
Michigan State
Notre Dame
Ohio State
Purdue
West
Illinois
Iowa
Iowa State
Minnesota
Northwestern
Wisconsin

PAC
North
BYU
Oregon
Oregon State
Utah
Washington
Washington State
South
Arizona
Arizona State
California
Stanford
UCLA
USC

SEC
East
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisville
Tennessee
Vanderbilt
West
Alabama
Auburn
LSU
Memphis
Mississippi
Mississippi State

Now, just get the 12 best remaining teams from the east (MAC and CUSA leftovers) and the 12 best from the west (WAC and MWC leftovers) and you'll have the perfect 8 team set up for a playoff.

12-team conferences are still stinko-matic.

Yeah, I think 8-teams conferences are ideal:

• Can play all conf opponents + 4 non-conf opponents = 11 games


• No need for Conf Championships

9 is the best number for a conference. 12 is not that bad, you get used to it. Actually it is more like a conference of 6, which you can build some better rivarlies of course you can lose some.

You just reminded me of something...

Lute Olson is now barking (after being unable to thwart the restart of the Pac-10 conference tournament) about wanting a 16-game conference schedule for the Pac, with no games before New Year's Day.

I'd call him a lone whiner, but to listen to a couple of media outlets during my Portland stay over Christmas, the idea is getting traction.

I'm tempted to think that some of this is solely because of the perception (which, in this case, involves substantial amounts of reality) that Tom Hansen is behind the times. I'm not about to dispute that. I don't think this presents a proper solution.

Thing is... perhaps this starts the Pac down the slippery slope.

Your comprehensive and general 12 team designs would be an improvement: but South Carolina back to the ACC, Penn State in the Big East, Louisville and Memphis in the SEC will never happen.

Also, South Florida wouldn't end up in the ACC either.

In a more perfect college football world, perhaps the top 120 (currently 119 1-As) would get together and devise 10 twelve team conferences, each having two divisions. Maybe more of 1-AA could be a part of the process to further generate crispier structure levels. They all would be open-minded and take into account all factors including tradition, geography, academics, rivalries, all-sports, funding, attendance, etc. But how to weigh all these factors in comparison to one another while controlling for selfishness? Consultants are not the answer either.
As unbalanced, dispersed, and fractured the system is currently, it may be the only real methodology that can work: incremental changes with spurts of significant re-alignment. College fb does change and schools change.
Those BCS conferences already at 12, I expect will show little or no change for quite a long time. One day, the Big10 may add another and the PAC10 may add a couple. Any fb conference commitment, currently unlikely, by Notre Dame would spark perhaps more than a single move. If or when the Big East splits, the fb will get some additions, probably further re-structuring C-USA. The MWC may add one to three at some point, perhaps soon pending BCS opportunities.
While the Big East fb replacements have city and directional names, BCS conferences are reluctant to embrace non-flagships/non-land grants/unproven privates among their ranks. State universities that are not #1 or #2 in their respective states (perhaps with some exceptions in large states such as Texas and Florida), they offer little appeal to the major conferences. Thus, C-USA and the WAC, for example.

D&C,
The WAC has institutions that are #1 & #2 in their states. Try Nevada (Nevada's land grant school), Hawaii, Utah State (Utah's land grant school), and New Mexico State(New Mexico's land grant school). What hold them back is not their popularity in their own state but rather their state's population and/or distance from the majority of the television viewing public.
BTW, SportsKC,
BC is not going back to the Big East nor is the Big East going to take them back. Ditto on Penn State. It also just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for the Big East to go to twelve teams (even if it did split from the basketball schools. Too many conference championship games already.)
South Carolina is in the SEC to stay. Ditto on Arkansas.

Too many conference championships?

Wrong.

3 out of 6 is not too many.


A Big East championship game in NYC sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

One is too many.

Signed,

Someone Actively Looking To Become The Only True Conference Nazi

Long time fan,
You do have a point about Utah State, Nevada, NMSU, and Hawaii. Idaho people would claim the same in terms of name and historical factors. Population, as you noted, has much to do with it. We do know in the east (New England, except UCONN) and Delaware, and in the Dakotas and Montana, there are flagship-type schools that are not 1-A fb. Particularly, in New England, population features (a lot of people in this region), alone, are not the reason for certain schools not being 1-A. I think the WAC has a future even if the MWC changes some. I really don't see the divide between the MWC and the WAC as profound as some suggest. That could change with a shift or two.

A good topic to discuss and debate!

I have said I preferred 12 team conferences. That is not necessarily to imply that 12 teams is the perfect model, but it works well for the SEC in fb and bb and has been adapted by other conferences. The ACC went through a controversial expansion to the same.

Rather 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12, or even 14, whatever a conference prefers, there is inconsistency. The question may be not how many, exactly, but if inconsistency in numbers is preferable to an a system or arrangement of equal conference numbers across the board. In structures like the BCS, does conference inconsistency in size, with some having championship games, impact conference success? I think so, but to what level and outcomes, can be difficult to explain or prove.