Zemek Point: The Little Guy Needs To Survive

Point/Counterpoint: Zemek on how the little guy is being kept down.

Before saying anything else, it's important to emphasize that with few exceptions, the schools in the bottom five conferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision should not be playing what is recognized today as top-tier college football.

The key point, though, is that these schools are not and have not been the drivers of their own demise. The lower rungs of the FBS have not been uniquely irresponsible or singularly foolish. It might seem pointless to conduct a debate about whether America's smaller FBS programs are more oppressor or oppressed, but if it's important to show the way forward for the reform of college sports, it's worth taking the side of the smaller schools. This isn't done idly or just for kicks; it's done to make an essential overarching point about college sports writ large.

When the United States Supreme Court handed down the NCAA v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma ruling in 1984, the landscape of college football changed so dramatically because the nature of college football on television changed so dramatically. The sport was able to be televised much more frequently, improving its exposure but also reducing advertising rates and forcing both schools and conferences to re-evaluate how they negotiated TV contracts. By the mid-1990s, the College Football Association, the vehicle through which major broadcast (non-cable) networks arranged their TV packages in prior decades, was sent to its deathbed, officially ceasing to exist on June 30, 1997. In little more than a decade, the economics of college football experienced such a profound transformation that it was – and is – unreasonable to expect any member school to make radical adjustments in a short time frame.

Really – how should the Idahos and New Mexico States and Louisiana-Lafayettes and Akrons have dealt with this situation? Should these and other lower-tier FBS schools (existing before the Football Bowl Subdivision even became an actual entity; it was then referred to as "Division I-A") have been expected to move to Division I-AA without delay? Should the alteration of CFA contracts and the arrival of Notre Dame's NBC-only (home game) deal have forced a mass downsizing at dozens of schools throughout the country?

Just exactly what person or persons at these schools should have been expected to lead this movement? What about the larger leadership structure of the sport? Why shouldn't various member schools have been given a roadmap for either responsible growth or responsible downsizing, with enough incentives to make their programs appreciably profitable? Why couldn't the college football community – knowing that TV contracts were going to escalate due to greater negotiating freedom – find a way to plan ahead and stabilize the sport not for 10 or 15 but 40 or 50 years?

Are we to believe that the presidents and athletic directors in Moscow, Idaho, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, should have been able to survey the national chessboard with just as much acumen as those in Tuscaloosa and Ann Arbor, making moves before the power-conference schools? Should the smaller Division I-A (now FBS) schools have been expected to basically step aside so that only the big boys could play? Should the smaller schools have been expected to take the lead in backing away from the six-figure paycheck games in early September (or for some parts of the SEC, the third Saturday of November) that give them the dollars they have so constantly relied on?

There's little question that these smaller FBS schools are in over their heads today. However, this situation is not of their own making; forces beyond their control, accelerated in this most recent (two-year) round of realignment, have made the lower-tier schools reactors instead of initiators for the most part. It's true that some Football Championship Subdivision schools are making the upward move to the FBS, but only after realizing how fragile (and needy) Conference USA and the Sun Belt have become.

College football – and the whole of college sports, for that matter – now has a chance to rewrite the rules of the jungle. We don't need 16-team superconferences; more teams per conference means fewer dollars per school. We don't necessarily need teams to break away from the NCAA, though that's definitely something worth studying with great care and diligence. What college football definitely needs to do is to detach football from Title IX restrictions and regulations, creating a situation in which schools can use scholarships with more flexibility, shaping their programs the way they want to.

In accordance with giving programs the ability to follow various paths, college sports can craft a larger architecture in which schools can compete at certain levels against certain tiers of competition that merit appropriate amounts of national exposure and TV dollars. Plenty of thoughtful people who either follow or work within collegiate athletics have advanced the idea of an English Premier League relegation system, in which football teams can play their way upward or downward in a multi-tiered setup. That offers one potential model for the future. A perfectly reasonable alternative is to allow teams from the non-power conferences (especially if the Big East does not survive the next two to three years) to craft schedules composed of power-conference teams, thereby meriting legitimate consideration for the FBS national championship. Teams that do not want to play 12 games within the top tier of the FBS can be sent to (no, not the FCS, but instead…) a lower tier of the FBS, an in-between entity that would create intriguing (albeit non-box-office) matchups among dozens of schools.

You can begin to gain a feel for what's going on here: College football can give schools a menu of choices. The schools can look at their resources and consider which path they want to follow. Television networks can litter their slates on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday nights with second-tier FBS games, while the top tier of the FBS sticks with Thursday night games and an occasional Friday selection. If schools have the ability to either rise or fall (to be upgraded or relegated), TV contracts can be re-adjusted with plenty of provisions and caveats. In short, college football could – if it chose to – reorganize its infrastructure in such a way that the Idahos and New Mexico States could be given options. If Idaho and NMSU were to make the wrong choices in such an environment, nobody would be in a position to view them sympathetically. However, that kind of moment has not yet arrived.

The bottom line is this: Schools in the lower rungs of the FBS need to be shown a way in which they can live within their means and thrive. Most of them will not be able to play big-boy football or make the megabucks TV money deserved by high-performing conferences such as the SEC, Big 12, and Big Ten. Schools such as Xavier and Gonzaga who make money off big-time basketball have flourished precisely because they have not tried to build football programs. FBS football – pulled off successfully by Boise State – is not meant for every WAC or Mountain West or Conference USA program, not to mention the MAC or the Sun Belt at the bottom of the totem pole. Yet, before telling Idaho and New Mexico State that they can't play big-boy football, they need to be given a viable alternative. The sport can then organize itself in ways that will be conducive to long-term stability. If any school makes the wrong decision, the system will be in position to relegate it. This is how college football should be reformed. Demanding that Idaho leave the FBS and accept its FCS crust of bread? That's not adult leadership; it's not a plan; it's not a fully realized vision of how collegiate athletics should be overhauled.