In this crazy time of college conference realignment, I would like to share something I came up with over four years ago. The idea is simple, group eighty colleges into four regions North, South, East, and West, with each region having two divisions of ten teams each.
Goals
- Group college football teams by geographic location into regions
- Encourage playing teams outside your region
- Select eight teams for CFP by results on the field instead of a committee
- Have fun on Mayhem week
Regular Season Schedule
Each team has the following schedule:
- 3 "preseason" games, can be any team outside your own region
- 5 intra-divisional games
- Always play one intra-divisional team every year while rotating the other eight teams in two groups of four
- 3 games from the other division within your region
- 1 college football "Mayhem" game where nobody knows who they're playing until the Sunday morning after the seventh game is in the books. You only know ahead of time whether you will play at home or away on Mayhem week, and you will never play another team in your region this week
Playoff Schedule
Division Elimination Round
- Top team from each division goes to the Division Elimination round (that's eight teams total)
- Select four #1 seeds placed into one bucket and the #2 seeds into another bucket
- Randomly select a #1 and a #2 seed to play one another
- The seeds cannot be from the same region
- They cannot have played each other during the regular season (this rule can be broken if there is no other way to schedule teams)
- The #2 team goes to play at the #1 team's home turf
- This could mean using a substitute venue at the option of the #1 seed. For instance if Texas and Colorado play each other and Colorado is the #1 seed, then they could play at Mile High Stadium instead of CU's stadium
Bowl Elimination Round
- The remaining four teams play at two of the bowl sites just like they do now for the College Football Playoff
- The National Championship game is between the two winners of the Bowl Elimination round
Possible Region Selections
Selecting the regions is relatively easy, whereas selecting the divisions within each region can be a challenge. Especially the East region who is heavily weighted with teams in the Southern part of the U.S. There would need to be some teams in that area actually be in the North division of the East region.
North Region
- Cincinnati
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Iowa State
- Kansas
- Kansas State
- Maryland
- Michigan
- Michigan State
- Minnesota
- Missouri
- Nebraska
- Northwestern
- Notre Dame
- Ohio State
- Penn State
- Purdue
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
South Region
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Auburn
- Baylor
- Georgia
- Houston
- Kentucky
- LSU
- Louisville
- Memphis
- Mississippi
- Mississippi State
- Oklahoma
- Oklahoma State
- Tennessee
- TCU
- Texas
- Texas A&M
- Texas Tech
- Vanderbilt
East Region
- Boston College
- UCF
- Clemson
- Duke
- East Carolina
- Florida
- Florida State
- Georgia Tech
- Miami
- North Carolina
- North Carolina State
- Pittsburgh
- Rutgers
- South Carolina
- South Florida
- Syracuse
- Temple
- Virginia
- Virginia Tech
- Wake Forest
West Region
- Arizona
- Arizona State
- Boise State
- BYU
- Cal
- UCLA
- Colorado
- Colorado State
- Hawaii
- UNLV
- New Mexico
- Oregon
- Oregon State
- San Diego State
- USC
- Stanford
- Utah
- Utah State
- Washington
- Washington State
