Some things are really superfluous – like a third nostril. So, when the thought of something like that flashes into my mind, my normal instinct is to move on as quickly as possible to something that has a higher chance of being relevant. I had one such instance recently and was just about to flush the idea down whatever serves as the sewage drain for ideas – - and then I stopped. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Maybe the world of college football actually needs another conference.
Recall about a week ago, I told you about the recently fired football coach at SMU who said that perhaps SMU might have to relax its academic standards if it were going to be able to compete with the “big boys”. As I said then, the folks running SMU – the only recipient of the NCAA “Death Penalty” to date – could not have been thrilled at the suggestion. But maybe there is the germ of a useful idea in there.
It seems that in lots of the major conferences, there are schools that always struggle to compete – except in those Cinderella seasons that happen once every two or three decades – because those schools really do have higher academic standards for admission than their conference counterparts. Oh, and these schools also tend to make their athletes attend classes regularly and do their own academic work and get reasonable if not honor roll grades in their courses. So, maybe there needs to be a new conference made up of those kinds of schools where they can play each other more often than not and find themselves on a more or less level playing field.
Who could be in such a conference, you ask? Well, that was a sticking point for me at first because I was hobbled by the antiquaated thinking about collegiate conferences – - that they should be geographically compact. But as soon as I started to think about Conference USA with a geographical span from Huntingdon, West Virginia to El Paso, Texas, I realized I might be able to give up on that notion. Then I pondered the geographical compactness of the WAC and realized that regionality really was an outdated notion. In the WAC – even if you ignore Hawaii which is several time zones away from the closest of its rivals – the other schools cover the states of California, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and Louisiana.
Having gotten rid of the shackles of regionality, I could construct a conference that I’ll call Schools Whose Athletes Take Their Own Exams (SWAT-TOE for short until someone can come up with a better name). The second challenge was to come up with ten schools in this conference such that they can play a full football schedule but aren’t big enough to get NCAA approval for a “Championship Game”. Nonetheless, SWAT-TOE’s champion should get an automatic invitation to a bowl game. I don’t mean a BCS Bowl Game here; that’s not the objective. I mean the champion here should get an automatic berth is something bigger than the Humanitarian Bowl but smaller than the BCS Elite Bowl Games.
Here’s the line-up.
Stanford has to secede from the PAC-10 and stop trying to compete with all those huge state schools.
Northwestern has to secede from the Big-10 for the same reason.
Duke would need to secede its football program from the ACC but retain its ACC basketball membership. That might be tricky, because the ACC needs 12 football teams to hold its playoffs and someone would have to join on a football only basis. I presume that could be arranged given the money ACC football makes.
Vanderbilt has been on the rise as a football program in recent years, but they are banging their heads against the wall trying to win an SEC Championship against the likes of the other schools in that conference.
So, there were the four obvious cornerstones of SWAT-TOE. Now all I had to do was come up with six more schools. Three more can easily be found by looking at the service academies; no one can really question the fact that their academic/athletic policies are aligned with SWAT-TOE. The addition of Army, Navy and Air Force gave me seven schools.
Rice fits the bill nicely here to make for SWAT-TOE’s eighth school.
Baylor is hugely overmatched in the Big-12 – as it used to be in the old Southwest Conference – and is a natural as the ninth school to be invited to join.
But where to find the tenth school? The easy answer would be to pick a school from the Ivy League and/or the Patriot League for SWAT-TOE, but that would simply set up the same situation that exists now; there would be one team that was always going to be overmatched. I thought about several other schools but they just didn’t fit my mental model of the academic atmosphere that the rest of the SWAT-TOE schools emanate. [I’ll refrain from naming the three schools I had in mind here in order to avoid the howls of protest from alums from those schools and the assertions that I don’t know my posterior from the fifty-yard-line.]
And then – in a flash – it came to me. There is a well known private institution whose football program struggles to compete with the “big boys” that has had at least a few prominent alums suggest that they might need to alter academic standards to get to the top. And so, my suggestion for the tenth and final school for SWAT-TOE is – - drum roll please – -
Notre Dame.
There you are. I alphabetical order, here are the members of the new conference – one that Dr. Myles Brand ought to endorse wholeheartedly since they put academics ahead of athletics:
Air Force
Army
Baylor
Duke
Navy
Northwestern
Notre Dame
Rice
Stanford
Vanderbilt
It even sets up a natural rivalry between Navy and Vanderbilt. After all, Navy is producing the Admirals of the future and Vanderbilt is the Commodores. Someone cleverer than I could turn that into something…
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…