........A 24 Member Alliance.........How It Could Work

[PlummMeanGreen]

Listening to a few CUSA presidents and AD's or reading some of their quotes, I sense that there is a certain amount of intrigue with a 24 school Alliance from some of them.

Excerpt From An ADLER Post On How It Could work...

"...here's a thought for a 24 team conference divided into four 6 team quadrants.

All the conference teams have only an 11 game set schedule which includes all five opponents in their quadrant. The twelfth week games would be semifinal game between winners of the eastern quadrants and a semifinal game between winners of the western quadrants. The winners of these two games would proceed to the conference championship game. These semifinals and championship game are designed to maximize the chances of getting a team into the BCS level bowls.

The remaining 20 league members that didn't qualify for those semifinal games would have their twelfth game scheduled by seeding according to record (best teams would host worst teams). That would maximize the quantity of conference teams that would be bowl eligible.

It's a system to get as many teams as possible into postseason play, and hopefully it will generate sufficient revenue to make bodybag games unnecessary. It's designed to get 14 of the 24 member schools into bowl games each year."

[NorthTexan95]

I kinda like the idea but there's one thing I don't like. 11 game regular season ... 5 against division opponents ... that leaves 6 games. Either teams will struggle to come up with six non-conference games or you need two or three more conference games against one of the other divisions. This leads to unbalanced schedules which I hate. However, the rest of it would be exciting.

[UNTflyer]

And do the non-quadrant winners only play 11 games, period?

[GrayEagle]

One other non-related point to ponder...if the conference goes to 24 teams there is a strong possibility that we would be in the west.

[PlummMeanGreen]

I kinda like the idea but there's one thing I don't like. 11 game regular season ... 5 against division opponents ... that leaves 6 games. Either teams will struggle to come up with six non-conference games or you need two or three more conference games against one of the other divisions. This leads to unbalanced schedules which I hate. However, the rest of it would be exciting.

OOC games for most upwardly bound programs means scheduling ranked teams and if we were a part of this Alliance we'd have some flexibility in scheduling those.

A 24 school Alliance will cover such a geographical area that hopefully the league's premier programs will already be gaining the respect (and more poll votes) from what will become a "coast to coast" Alliance footprint media.

Of course, we hope our own program advances to the level of our former Big West conference mate, ie, Boise State whereas "body bag games" become what we will be called by lesser opponents. Boise State had such a role reversal years ago now.

GMG!

[Eagle91Gator95]

You could easily jump to 7 conference games by playing 2 teams from another devision on a rotating schedule, much the same way 12 team conferences rotate cross-divisional games from year to year. I would suggest keeping the cross-divisional games between the same two divisions to allow for better rivalry building and familiarity with your fan base, but you could always do a big rotation which would give you a bigger variety of teams coming to town and decrease the frequency that any team has to play a powerhouse in another division.