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 Pod People?A sea-change is occuring on the college football landscape. After a weeks-long period of speculation and consternation, the end of the story appeared to be that the ACC would grow by two teams. Miami, because the ACC really, really wanted them, and Virginia Tech, because the University of Virginia would only sign on to the Miami deal if the Hokies came along for the ride. That left the ACC with 11 teams, an odd format shared by the Big Ten, and meant that the ACC would be denied the major financial incentive of expansion: a championship game. NCAA rules permit postseason conference games only in leagues with 12 or more teams. So once all of the negotiations were over, it appeared that the Big East was wounded, but could survive. With major markets in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston secure, the Big East could attempt to lure a couple of competitive teams from the MAC, Conference USA, or some other league, and carry on. The ACC would have to try to steal away someone else's school in future years, and in the mean time prepare a petition to the NCAA to allow an 11-team conference to play postseason games. All that changed this weekend. Apparently, the negotiations have been continuing, and it now appears that the ACC has its 12th team in Boston College. And the Big East is dead. Expansion can be a great thing from a fan's perspective, but the decision to grow larger has a number of trade-offs for the member institutions. In adding a schools as far flung as Miami and Boston College, teams take on financial obligations to travel to those far-flung sites for games. To maintain the competitve balance, schools may potentially have to play more games in-conference, limiting the number of natural rivalry games they can play out-of-conference. In addition, in-conference games must be home-and-home series in alternate years, denying larger programs the opportunity to schedule sure-fire money makers on campus. Because it is impossible for every team to play every other team in a 12-team conference, most conferences adopt some form of random scheduling where winning the conference can be as much a factor of how good you are as who you happen to miss on the schedule that season. Add to that that the rotation means that many historic rivalries can't be scheduled annually. If the ACC is to adopt a divisional format, they have a unique problem. Geographically, the conference will span the entire north-south dimension of the nation, from Miami to Boston College. In contrast, the conference has virtually no east-west spread; it truly hugs the Atlantic Coast. So the only sensible geographic division is to find a Mason-Dixon line, so to speak. There are four schools clearly in the north: Boston College, Maryland, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. There are four schools clearly in the south: Miami, Florida State, Clemson, and Georgia Tech. The problem is there is no clear way to separate the schools in the middle: North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke, and Wake Forest. These are also the historical nucleus of the conference, with key rivalries for particularly the first 3 teams. These rivalries, to be sure, are more noteworthy in basketball than in football. But rivalries aren't the only factor - imagine that NC State might not play North Carolina one year due to being in separate divisions, so that NC State might pay for a trip to Miami and UNC a trip to Boston rather than a bus ride across town. Would "Pods" Work In The ACC? One suggestion made on the SJS College Football Message Board by BioLeftHip was to use a pod format, particularly in the basketball league. Such a division might work in the football league as well. The three pods would be:
Teams would play the other members of their pod every year (3 games). They would then play 2 teams from each of the other pods for a total of 7 conference games. Yearly expenses would be kept roughly equal, and all of the natural rivalries (Virginia - Virginia Tech, Florida State - Miami, North Carolina - Duke) would be played annually. At only 7 conference games, teams could continue to play 4 games outside of the conference, allowing the continuation of other long-standing series (Georgia - Georgia Tech, South Carolina - Clemson, Florida - Florida State, Boston College - Notre Dame). Problems arise, too, from this scheme. First, the conference achieves an ideal geographic balance at the expense of a competitive balance. The southern pod becomes clearly the dominant pod. Since 1981, the southern pod has racked up 9 national championships (at least one for each member), whereas the other pods combined have none (and only one whiff, Virginia Tech in 1999). But just as clearly, the northern pod is stronger than the central. Virginia Tech has been a consistent power under Frank Beamer, and the other three teams have had many bowl seasons in the past 20 years. Second, there is no clear method of determining the entrants into the conference championship game. There is no provision for a "wild card" game in the NCAA, nor should there be. So the two teams who advance to the conference championship would have to be chosen as the overall best and second-best team in the league, regardless of pod affiliation. This could result in Miami-FSU rematches in the title game, but rematches are common even in divisional conferences and arguably far more interesting than if the divisions are unbalanced. For example, in the SEC, the conference championship game has often been an afterthought to the bigger in-division matchups during the regular season. In the end, the ACC schools will have to decide how expensive a divisional format will be, and how much competitive balance is an issue. But the pod setup might uniquely make sense in the ACC given its geographical make up and its history. Whether it will prove to be workable in practice, and whether a pod structure is even permitted under NCAA rules, will be the next fascinating round in the restructuring negotiations. |
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