Having laid out how I’m going to measure the value of schools when choosing them for a super league, it’s time to actually select the teams. I originally intended not to say a lot and just take the teams, and later on that’s what I’ll do, but I started out expounding at length about why certain teams were being selected or turning up on the list when they did, and ended up saying so much that I ended up breaking it into two parts. This part will cover what I imagine to be the smallest possible league, and we’ll look at larger league sizes tomorrow.
We’ll start with the eight schools most commonly cited as being among college football’s “blue bloods”, listed in order of their value after the academics step:
- Texas
- Michigan
- Notre Dame
- Ohio State
- Nebraska
- Alabama
- Oklahoma
- USC
One thing to note here is that after all realignments come through, Notre Dame will be the only school here that’s not a member of the SEC or Big Ten. This underscores just how much those two conferences will now control the college football landscape. Not coincidentally, the Big Ten is the only conference that had two blue bloods before the 90s wave of realignment, and the SEC would pass them as soon as you look at the schools just outside of this group (the “indigo bloods”).
I considered not including two blue bloods listed here just yet, Nebraska and USC. Nebraska has not yet shown that they can truly be a blue blood caliber program without Tom Osborne, as they’ve struggled since joining the Big Ten, while USC’s value after the academics step badly lags the others and including it without other West Coast schools would create long travel distances for the other schools (not that that stopped the Big Ten). But Nebraska’s value is high enough that it would probably end up joining soon enough, while USC is an iconic enough program, in a key enough recruiting state, to bring along regardless. Recall that the goal of the super league should be to be the undisputed top tier of college football, and USC is a big enough brand that even if they’re stinking up the joint in the NCAA, their mere presence serves as a counterweight to any claim the super league might have. USC is especially vital to convince Notre Dame to join the league; the Irish place a high enough value on independence that they’ll need a critical mass of schools to demonstrate to them that if they don’t join the league, they won’t be able to maintain their blue blood status, to say nothing of being able to make money, and USC, one of their longest, most storied rivals, is pretty much a prerequisite for that. In other words, the goal for us before we start looking for stopping points should be:
- Have enough schools that Notre Dame can’t help but join the league.
- Include Clemson so there’s no question, at least in the short term, that the best team in college football is in the league.
Getting Notre Dame to join, in particular, could ultimately justify expanding the league beyond what both the schools and the funders would otherwise want to hold it to to maximize payouts to schools and avoid having to cover deadweight; if adding a set of schools is enough to get Notre Dame to join the league, you effectively have to consider the Domers’ value alongside the value of the schools actually being selected.
Georgia, Penn State, and LSU seem to generally be considered the closest schools to blue-blood status outside of this group. Let’s go ahead and add them, plus a few other high-value schools that may prove pivotal to the super league’s success:
- Georgia
- Tennessee
- Florida
- Florida State
- Penn State
- LSU
The Florida schools give us a presence in the largest recruiting state not yet colonized, and both of them also have a claim to near-blue blood status (and Florida State ensures we take a team from every power conference), while Tennessee would be the highest-value school remaining by a decent margin and once might have been in the blue-blood conversation. (Notably, if Tennessee were left out at this point Texas A&M would be the only other school not yet in the league whose home stadium seats over 100,000.) With Penn State and LSU, we have a presence in the top eight recruiting states, totaling over 60% of all FBS recruits.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the rankings, something to note: for the most part, I’m only going to calculate indices of potential for schools within $5 million of the top post-rivalry score value, in hope of simplifying the calculations involved. I also intended to only calculate rivalry scores for schools within $15 million in post-academic score value of the top team not yet in the league, but rivalry scores are, by and large, much easier to calculate, and rivalry scores of lower-tier teams have an impact on higher-level teams’ indices of potential, so it wasn’t too long before I ended up calculating rivalry scores for every team with even a remote chance of joining the league. At this point, though, I was sticking with a relatively small universe of schools to calculate rivalry scores for, and I wanted to pick at least two more schools, so we’ll take the schools within $15 million of Auburn in post-academic score value, and as it happens there’s a pretty clear break:
As it happens, three of Auburn’s most competitive rivalries are already in the field (Georgia, Florida, and Alabama), causing it to surge ahead of Washington and leaving the Huskies as the only school within $5 million, with Texas A&M just a bit behind. We’ll calculate indices of potential for all three:
This actually understates the case for Washington. Just its status as a flagship university in a state without an existing league school and with a growing population would be enough to put it less than half a million behind Auburn, and factoring in the potential to pull in an audience from Idaho put it over the top. (Note that at the time the NYT map was made, Idaho was still an FBS program and so was the dominant program in most of the Idaho panhandle. I allocated the entire state to Boise State except for Kootenai County near Spokane, which appeared to be colored Oregon green; later I subscribed to the Times so I could pull up the interactive map and investigate more closely, but at this point I wanted to avoid doing that at all costs given my past experience.) But Washington is so far away from any other league school that it would be the closest league school for the entire Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and even parts of far northern California. But I didn’t calculate that because I knew that once I added Washington, Oregon wouldn’t be far behind.
- Washington
Washington is Oregon’s highest-scoring rival, so the Ducks take a big jump in rivalry score once the Huskies join the league, and with Oregon being arguably the most successful Pac-12 program other than USC in the past couple decades, its territory includes all of Montana and Alaska, western North Dakota, and extends surprisingly far south into California, even including the coastal areas south of the Bay Area, with even Hawaii proving to be Ducks country. (I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the NYT map came out in the midst of a Ducks season that would take them to the CFP championship game – with a Hawaiian as quarterback. When we get to other California schools, I’ll be considering Hawaii to be its home state’s dominant school, but this possibly inflated fanbase will hurt the chances of the Bay Area schools substantially.) Because much of Ducks’ territory is actually closer to Washington, Nebraska, or USC, the only areas claimed by Oregon that I actually considered when calculating their potential (other than Oregon itself) were the parts in California, though significant parts of Idaho and Nevada, and possibly part of Wyoming, are closer to Oregon than any league school. But those areas are pretty rural, and Oregon isn’t much of a hotbed of recruiting talent, so it doesn’t help the Ducks much:
- Auburn
- Texas A&M
With the inclusion of these two teams, Clemson has the only stadium with a capacity over 80,000 not yet in the league (not counting the Rose Bowl). Since Auburn’s rivals are mostly already in the league, their inclusion doesn’t help the case of anyone that’s particularly close to entering consideration, but Texas A&M has a longstanding rivalry with Arkansas, and the drop down to Oregon puts more schools in range of inclusion. Michigan State, with its rivalries with both Michigan and (critically) Notre Dame, particularly stands out.
- Oregon
- Arkansas
- South Carolina
- Michigan State
- Wisconsin
- Iowa
Some notes on the above chart:
- Oregon’s value went up a bit because I forgot to include Clark County, Washington, in the previous chart.
- It’s only around this group that USC would show up if I hadn’t included them among the group of blue-bloods.
- I identified Arkansas and South Carolina as teams whose value seemed to have been inflated both by being in the SEC and doing well during this period, but Arkansas didn’t actually do very well at all. Coupled with having a decent-sized stadium (Clemson and UCLA are the only teams neither in the league nor on the chart above with a larger one), it suggests Arkansas may have more inherent value than you may think.
- South Carolina, on the other hand, did have a decent amount of success during this period, and their final value may be inflated for a bit of an unfair reason: it gets credit for being the closest league school for most of North Carolina, the state with the second-most recruits not yet in the league, and a very fast-growing state (expected to go from having more than two million fewer people than Illinois now, to having more people by 2040) that has the highest flagship bonus of states without league teams. (The Gamecocks’ territory at the moment also extends into Virginia, which has the third-most recruits of non-league states.) South Carolina’s score after the rivalry step is over $15 million more than North Carolina (and $12 million more than Virginia Tech), but the gaps in the range in-between are large enough that UNC is a contender for membership in a 32-team league, only 12 teams away at the point South Carolina was picked. South Carolina would still make this chart without that benefit (and you could use that to argue that I’m not allowing conference effects to have enough of a skew), but would be behind the Big Ten teams. Worth noting that South Carolina does have the second-largest stadium (not counting the Rose Bowl) not yet in the league after their rivals Clemson.
- When the NYT map was published Wisconsin claimed an unusually large chunk of Minnesota, including the Twin Cities where the University of Minnesota itself is. I considered simply declaring Minnesota the dominant program across the entire state, since Paul Bunyan’s Axe has become at least somewhat more competitive since then, but I figured the fact this was even possible was something of an indictment of the depth of Gophers fandom. (It’s worth noting that this may partly be the result of Wisconsin and Minnesota treating each other state’s residents as in-state for tuition purposes.) This wouldn’t have affected where Wisconsin was picked, in all likelihood, but it did hurt Iowa somewhat.
- Not a lot, though; the areas Iowa could have claimed that got snapped up by Wisconsin (and Arkansas, in Missouri) were more than outweighed by Iowa’s rivalries with Michigan State and Wisconsin, to the point that by the time I selected them their value had very nearly caught up with the listed value for Wisconsin – and their value after the rivalry step had surpassed the final value listed. I had thought I’d be able to stop by the time I got to the end of this list because other schools (thinking of Minnesota) would have gotten in range, but at this point Iowa was too far ahead of any other contenders – or so I thought.
It’s at this point I should give away a little secret: the charts above have an inaccurate, mostly too high, calculation of the index of potential. When I started this process, when calculating each county’s share of recruits going to the school under consideration, I added one-quarter of the ratio of the distance to the school under consideration to that to the dominant school in the county, rather than the other way around. This wasn’t a matter of me screwing up when entering the formulas in Excel; that’s what the Part I post said until I got to this point. I’m not sure if this was a matter of me going on autopilot based on the similar ratios used on earlier steps, and me not realizing that adding this ratio would effectively reward schools for being further away from a given county and said county being closer to the school they root for, or if I had a larger method to the madness. But for the most part, I don’t think it’s affected the analysis above too much, and I think the schools chosen above would still make the super league. But look at the chart I found myself looking at at this point:
So, remember when I said I was only going to calculate indices of potential for schools within $5 million of the highest ranking school not yet in the league after the rivalry stage? Yeeeeah, at this point that started to look like a chintzy proposition. I only even bothered to calculate an index of potential for Colorado on a whim because I didn’t want Utah to get too much credit for being the only team in its part of the country. Besides that factor, Utah and Colorado are in fast-growing states, but what’s really fueling this is that they’re getting as high a score for recruiting from Bernalillo County, New Mexico, as any other school’s entire index of potential. Distances from Bernalillo County are being calculated from a point within the city of Albuquerque and just a stone’s throw away from the University of New Mexico campus. So it was at this point I decided that this didn’t pass the smell test, determined where this was coming from, and adopted the calculation referred to in Part I, and at that point I was too far along to re-calculate even the chart I’d just finished working with. The result was to knock Utah back below Minnesota, and Colorado all the way back into the $51 million range, while keeping the values for Miami and Minnesota the same, so let’s just go ahead and add the Hurricanes to the league:
- Miami (FL)
24 would be a decent size for a league, but we haven’t added Clemson yet and there’s enough other schools still outstanding that Notre Dame could easily justify not joining the league – especially with Illinois, the ninth-most fertile state for recruits and the most fertile state without a team in the league, being right in the Golden Domers’ backyard. Still, there’s enough of a dropoff in name value at this point that this would be a good place to define the league’s “charter members”. Recall that the European Super League intended to have a core set of charter members immune to promotion-and-relegation-like effects and a handful of additional teams that needed to remain successful to remain in the league. That would be the first 24 schools in this league, perhaps replacing South Carolina with, say, Minnesota, and then the remaining teams could be chosen on the basis of a combination of on-field success and overall value, allowing teams in what’s left of FBS to have a relatively easy path into the league and potentially making Notre Dame feel better about the situation even if they don’t elect to be a charter member.
At right are the best non-league teams in the 2021 and 2022 seasons (ignoring the wonky 2020 pandemic season), as determined by the Simple Rating System calculated by Sports Reference. You can see there’s a substantial drop-off between Baylor and NC State, and I cut the chart off at another drop-off. The degree to which these schools bring value, especially Cincinnati, Wake Forest, and Pitt, can be hit or miss, but nonetheless this should provide a solid base of schools to pick from, especially schools like Utah and Baylor. Here’s what a 32-team league with the final eight schools picked from the list at right might look like:
Northern College Football Conference
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Eastern College Football Conference
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Western College Football Conference
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Southern College Football Conference
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If we want to have a firmer definition of the league, I only added Miami at this point and not anyone else because the Hurricanes have an active rivalry with Virginia Tech, which was already high enough to affect what schools got listed in the chart above. V-Tech only gets bumped up by about $2 million, not enough to make a difference with regards to what schools it has a chance to affect, but it still makes a good transition point to extend the list down a bit.
Utah, a school that had never been in a power conference until a little over a decade ago and (unlike every school picked so far) doesn’t have any rivalries with league teams, immediately stands out on this list. Besides its own success and revenue, Utah is one of the fastest growing states in the country and is isolated enough to take chunks out of several other states, including Colorado, another fast-growing state, and Arizona, which continues to grow at a good clip. Colorado is just off of this list and comes from a state with a larger raw expected population, but its catchment area is hemmed in by its relative proximity to Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas; Utah is more centrally located in a region of the country otherwise lacking in league teams, although Colorado does have a larger index of potential. You could argue that BYU should get credit as Utah’s main team even though it has much lesser revenue; it has a larger stadium, doesn’t benefit from being in a power conference, and it at least has the potential to be the team for the entire worldwide Mormon community. But its conservative politics could turn some decision-makers off, and for them, Utah is everything BYU is not: a secular, state flagship university, one that commands the loyalties of most of the state outside the areas immediately surrounding its FBS schools. (That can’t be said of Colorado, as for the purposes of calculating Utah’s index of potential, I had to make an executive decision to consider it the dominant school in most of the state south and west of the Denver area where Texas had more fans on the NYT map; even Wyoming leaked into the northwest corner of the state. Who knows if Deion Sanders can change that.) I’m a bit nervous about picking Utah ahead of Colorado, who’s been in a power conference longer, but Colorado’s final value isn’t enough to catch Utah’s post-rivalry value, Colorado doesn’t have any rivalries with league schools either, and Utah does have a larger stadium.
TCU concerns me a bit more. The NYT map shows that it barely manages to stake out a territory in the area around its own stadium, resulting in the lowest index of potential of any team we’ve considered so far (and that only by stealing a bit of Baylor’s territory), and it came out a couple of seasons into the Horned Frogs’ tenure in the Big 12 and in the middle of a 12-1 Peach Bowl season. Compare with Baylor which stakes out a decent amount of territory around the Waco campus, spent a longer time in the Big 12, and has had a number of good seasons of their own since the NYT map came out. TCU was once a member of the Southwest Conference (unlike Utah which was never a member of a power conference before joining the Pac-12), has the all-time edge in the rivalry with Baylor and has won more since it became a Big 12 matchup, and has a comparably sized stadium, but it still makes me worry that I’m not discounting recent on-field success enough, even though TCU has an edge of less than a full win a year over Baylor. If I were stopping at 28, I’d probably be leaving TCU out, and I’m not 100% certain they’d make a 32-team league. For the moment, though, let’s go ahead and add all the schools listed here:
- Minnesota
- Utah
- TCU
- Illinois
- Virginia Tech
Why include all five of these teams after talking about how I didn’t intend to include every team in the previous chart? Mostly to simplify the calculations for the remaining teams, specifically getting Illinois off the board before calculating the index of potential for Indiana, and getting Virginia Tech off the board before doing the same for North Carolina and to a lesser extent Clemson. Now for the teams that would currently be in line for the final three spots in a 32-team league:
Wait a tick, Northwestern? Aren’t they one of the teams that a super league would supposedly be formed to jettison? They’re not even getting credit for any potential whatsoever! A lot of this is a result of their superlative academics and three of their top four rivals already being in the league, but among conference rivals Northwestern not only beat the Indiana schools, Maryland, and Rutgers in raw revenue, but even edged out their cross-state rivals in Champaign.
That said, you could easily argue that this shows that we aren’t doing enough to factor out either conference or winning effects, though Northwestern’s average wins during the period considered for revenue was just a little over 7, meaning they benefitted from bowl trips but not too much more. And since Northwestern would be the #31 team selected, I think we can safely skip them in a 32-team league and not lose too much, and maybe even gain some. So we’ll just take the top team on the list…
- Baylor
…aaaaand that bumps up a rival enough to actually end up with a higher value than Baylor had.
- Texas Tech
Texas Tech would seem to be a textbook case of being a necessary addition to avoid breaking up a rivalry. But I’ve extended the list down to include every team with a final value over $50 million to provide just a glimpse of what we’re dealing with here: namely, the presence of Stanford, which has enough of a long-standing rivalry with Notre Dame as to potentially make the difference in whether or not the Golden Domers join the league. It just might be enough of a difference to make Stanford the 32nd team over Colorado and Ole Miss, and maybe even over Baylor and Texas Tech. (Note that Ole Miss might be understated, as outside its home state I only gave it credit for the area claimed by Memphis and not a portion of southeast Missouri, western Kentucky, and southern Illinois it was otherwise entitled to.) But North Carolina, who we covered earlier, and Clemson, still the main threat to any claim that the winner of the super league is the undisputed champion of college football, are just a couple million behind Stanford, bracketed by Indiana and Purdue, which would finish off the last of the “classic” Big Ten teams and make it harder not to include Northwestern. So to finish off our 32-team league, we’re going to remove TCU and put Stanford and Clemson in, and I’m actually going to remove Baylor and Texas Tech as well to make room for Colorado and North Carolina, resulting in:
Northern College Football Conference
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Eastern College Football Conference
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Western College Football Conference
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Southern College Football Conference
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Admittedly, as you might be able to see in the SRS chart, Clemson has had a couple of down years and you could argue that even with Dabo Swinney still at the helm, they’re in the twilight of their relevance at the national level, a bit of a historical aberration as far as that program is concerned, and therefore they aren’t strictly necessary additions to the league, allowing us to replace them with North Carolina, TCU, or Ole Miss (or replacing them and Colorado with Baylor and Texas Tech). But the Tigers were still ninth in the preseason AP poll this year, the only non-league team in the top 15, so clearly they’re still expected to be relevant even beyond some of the other points that have been made on their behalf. But between that and some of the more awkward conference assignment decisions on the chart above (Notre Dame in the West?), I think I might prefer the version with 24 permanent members and a potential promotion-relegation system. Either way, though, I think we’ve identified the smallest league that gets Notre Dame on board and sufficiently marginalizes the remaining FBS schools to be able to claim the best team in college football. (The last time a non-league team won a national championship in the eyes of one of the major polls was when Georgia Tech was chosen as the 1990 UPI champion; the last time a non-league team was national champion in the eyes of a majority of major polls was BYU in 1984.)
On that note, we should note that this size league would still leave a runt of an NCAA-run FBS division behind, so let’s see how they might realign into conferences. For the most part I’m going to assume that most Group of Five conferences will remain intact as they were before the current round of realignment, but between the power-conference schools left behind and the pre-2023 American, there should be enough room for roughly three or four FBS-level power conferences – four or five when you add in the Mountain West, which I think the Pac-12 schools left behind might. The NCAA’s general rule that teams belong to the same conference in every sport that conference contests, though, could restrict teams’ mobility, though several FCS conferences are administratively distinct from their linked all-sports conferences. These are based on the last set of conferences above, but you can probably adapt them to any conference alignment.
Pacific Coast Football Conference
Mountain West Football Conference
Big 12 Football Conference
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Atlantic Coast Football Conference
American College Football Conference
Possibly independent
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As it happens, the trade-offs involved in picking the last few schools in a 32-team league are tight enough that you could justify making it a bit bigger, and from there it doesn’t take much to get to the point where you’re completely obviating the separate existence of FBS. We’ll cover those scenarios tomorrow.
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