Quote Originally Posted by putter View Post
I wonder if you can go to the Soccer model? 5 Divisions with, approx 40 teams each. In England you have Premier, Championship, League 1 and 2 and a non-league division. The higher up you go the more $$ from TV etc. do the same here with the chance for promotion and relegation. Give programs a goal each year and each Division still can have a championship if they choose. Then, say NDSU and SDSU are 1-2 in league 2 then they can replace say a Nevada and Colorado St that had terrible years in the Championship and get the benefits that go with it.
You could maybe do something like that with a limited group, like a 2-division conference (as was proposed by some for a replacement to the PAC12 and MWC), but with much OOC scheduling getting put together multiple years in advance, I don't think you'd be able to do it across all of NCAA football. It'd also take a HUGE overhaul of things, and it's unlikely that the schools at the top are going to agree with changing things that drastically. I'm not opposed to the idea at all, I just don't think it's likely.

Slightly more likely would be for the top 64 teams of the P5 to break off and form their own semi-pro league completely separate from the NCAA, leaving everyone else to restructure. In this case, I don't know if the teams would legally become separate entities from the universities or what, but if they are, I'm sure they'd mostly rent the facilities from the universities and not much would change outside of how the budget is shuffled. In this case, you might end up seeing teams like Northwestern or Vanderbilt get left behind. This is also just for football (since it's what's driving most of the conference realignment and huge TV contracts)...other sports would probably stay with the current NCAA model.

You'd probably see the rest of the FBS (mostly the current G5) and the top maybe 30 or so of the current FCS (mostly MVFC, Big Sky, plus a few others) be the new DI FBS.
Same with a number of the top DII teams (thinking teams like Ferris State, Northwest Missouri State, Valdosta State, etc) joining the rest of the FCS to become the new FCS.