Because this was so last second, you’ve been awarded a single action item that will be accomplished immediately without litigation or bureaucratic red tape. What do you do to “save” the sport?
I’d enact a set of changes which would end up making NCAA football look like the NFL, but with relegation.
Recind NCAA governance of college football, form a football only league.
Enforce two primary conferences at the championship level, with a max size of 20-ish teams per conference. Only teams in these two conferences may compete in the end of year 8-12 team championship playoff.
The bottom two teams from each championship conference get relegated at the end of the year, and the top two teams from the non-championship conferences are promoted.
Promote interconference play at the league level during the regular season to get a better idea of strength of schedule. Require teams who want to maintain rivalry games with teams from other conferences to use their non-conference game weeks.
Make the money side of the game more standardized, with profit sharing from championship conference teams with those in other conferences. Protect a promoted team from being relegated for 1-2 years to encourage roster and program building.
This way we can still have a hundred bowl games, and teams with less money or organizational motivation to maintain championship level programs can still play meaningful games in competitive conferences.
I can almost guarantee that the promotion and relegation bowls will be more interesting than the national championship.
More bowls obviously. Now even local restaurants get the opportunity to sponsor a bowl. The fight for absolutely last place between the worst 2 teams is now the Chuck-e-Cheese bowl and it gets more viewership than the national championship game.
In addition, local high schools and sports complexes get to bid for these bowls. And there is an exhibition match before the national championship where the last place ranked team has to play the Harlem Globetrotters at baseball.
This is some absolute sicko shit and I am so here for it
For me, it’d be implementing limits and controls on advertising. I’m tired of the money of the sport dictating the actual sport (read updating the running clock rules) and while in our society it certainly can’t be eliminated. But I would put limits on how many and how long media timeouts are allowed to be, and revert clock rules to pre 2023 or similar rules. CFB has a captive audience so you could dramatically increase ad prices to counter limited space, so I honestly believe that revenue losses would be minimal. That and smack caps on said media deals, and force the broadcasters to more evenly distribute coverage amongst non super 2 programs. In the age of streaming there’s no reason we can’t have more broadcast crews covering more games. I’d even recommend combining the media’s systems with the college’s own broadcast systems for better coverage (think mlb getting two different broadcasts for each team’s crew).
