College Conference Realignment: Division I-A

Followers of this website have seen me on occasion stray from stadium visits into the world of college athletics, namely conferences. The original intention of a conference was to organize similar schools in a geographic area. It structurally made sense and was much better for the fans, especially those looking to travel to road games. However, we all know that train went off the tracks decades ago thanks to money and greed. Well, with the video game NCAA Football ’25 coming out and the ability to create custom conferences, it’s time to rethink how College Football is arranged. I want this in real life desperately, but know that it all is a pipe dream. In my fantasy world, the former FBS will go back to being called Division I-A, mainly because there are no more bowls. Here is how the conference set-up would be for I-A, along with how the regular season and playoffs work:

And now to the great unveiling of the conferences and teams at this level: Click the image below for a bigger picture and if you want to see the inner workings of how/why these teams went where they did, check out my YouTube video on it. There are also some Maps (below) to visually see these conferences and teams, though because Google only allows 10 layers in a map, I had to split them into two. I loved putting together a puzzle like this and hopefully down the road I can try and tackle Division I-AA. This will be an even tougher task because we have to consider non-basketball playing schools and where they’ll eventually belong to keep things at 10 teams across the board. 10 is the ideal goal because in football, you can play each team once. In basketball, you can do a home-and-home with each team during the season. And in baseball, you can play a weekend series with all other 9 schools.

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