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Message: [QUOTE="pokercuse08, post: 5038296, member: 6535"] Putting myself in the power brokers (SEC/B1G, specifically their biggest brands) seat for a moment, they currently have a hammer-lock on the situation. It's like a real life game of Monopoly, and they have all the developed properties. All they have to do is wait it out and with a few more trips around the board, the other conferences will collapse and they'll get their pick. The SEC has 16 members, and if they had their druthers they would probably give up Vandy and that's it? The B1G has 18, but they'd probably lose a few more - maybe Rutgers, Maryland, and Northwestern? How many more programs would be ~median programs in those conferences, value wise? You could at least make a case for 15-20 more schools: Notre Dame, Florida State, Clemson, North Carolina, Virginia are the obvious ones in my opinion, in no particular order. After that it's (again no particular order) Utah, Louisville, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Houston, Duke, Miami, Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia, Kansas State, Arizona, Arizona State. So why go from 34 to 70? Why share the pie with Boston College, Wake Forest, Baylor, UCF, Iowa State, Texas Tech, Washington State, Oregon State, etc, etc? The current path is to pick off the 10 to 20 schools they actually want, then try to find a way to shed the deadweight if possible - likely by making payouts skew for performance and try to turn programs like Rutgers and Vanderbilt into a financial mess. In order to change the path, you have to find a way to peel off the support of schools like Alabama, Georgia, Florida, LSU, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, etc. So you have to give them the two things they want: more of the money relative to even the other B1G/SEC schools and a way to drop the dead weight in their conferences. So it's got to be a tiered system that has a top tier of ~20 programs getting the most money. In order to be palatable enough to get a deal done, this has to be promotion/relegation based, while leaving those types of schools highly confident they're never getting demoted. Part of it would probably be record based on some sort of rolling basis, part might include automatic exemption to that level for anyone who's appeared in a national title game the previous five years, or won one the previous 10. Those 20 programs split into two "divisions" each year, and only play within their divisions - top four in each make the playoffs. The next tier gets ~50 programs, split into geographical divisions, no demotion for these programs, but you can be promoted to the top tier. You're looking at maybe six divisions. Add one, non-permanent, based on the promotion/relegation model. So now you've got seven divisions. Each winner is in the playoff, plus a wild card (or two if you have 5+1 instead of 6+1. The next tier is the rest of the current FBS, trying to get promoted. I think there's a viable path to something like this, with the powerhouses allying with the schools trying to preserve their seat at the table to make the bottom ~half of the SEC/B1G take a haircut. Other than helping the blue bloods on the football side get a bigger piece of the pie than they already have sooner than they're otherwise going to have it (and without looking as greedy), I don't see how you convince them not to stay the current course. [/QUOTE]

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