Grand Opening: Pac 10 vs. Big 10

Some ideas to improve college football create Hatfield-McCoy style feuds (playoff, anybody?) and others seem like no-brainers (have you signed this petition yet?). Jerry Green (Detroit News) and his friend Keith Ehrenreich (a USC fan) are floating an idea that's easy to like: an annual Pac 10 vs. Big 10 opening weekend.

The concept is simple. At the start of the season, the teams that finished atop the Pac 10 and Big 10 the year before will play each other. So will the runners-up. And the third-place teams. And so on. It's 10  games crammed into one day of football bliss.

The only potential drawback is if the top two teams meet in a BCS game (likely the Rose Bowl), then have to play each other again at the start of the following season. But is that really a problem? Rematches can be intriguing (American football is the only major sport without them). Had USC and Ohio State played each other this year in the Rose Bowl, could you imagine a master tactician like Pete Carroll or Jim Tressel spending the entire summer plotting revenge?

Of course, USC and OSU didn't play this January. The BCS has ripped apart the Rose Bowl/Pac 10/Big 10 relationship. The last four BCS national championship games featured either USC or OSU. Go back another two years, and not only were the Buckeyes in the title game, but the ideal Rose Bowl matchup of USC and Iowa was played in the Orange Bowl. This opening weekend plan could restore some semblance of tradition.

Teams will obviously be affected by senior/NFL departures, coaching changes and typical off-season happenings. That's just another wrinkle to give commentators something to talk about. Maybe some matchups will be uneven, but it can't be any worse than what we see now.

Other thoughts on the "Grand Opening":

• Since five games would be played in the West and five in the Midwest, you can't guarantee that a school gets a home game every other year. If both No. 1s played away games the year before, one of them will have to play on the road two years in a row. The leagues would have to find a way to ensure it wouldn't drag out too long for any one team, or come up with a revenue-sharing model that satisfies everybody.
• Normally I would prefer a "compete against the best" approach. That would mean the Pac 10 should schedule a recurring series against the Southeastern Conference. Unfortunately, the SEC has shown little interest in serious out-of-conference games. I'm pretty sure the SEC would dominate if it did this with either the Pac 10 or Big 10.
• One of the ideas floating around the blogosphere is a move toward "superconferences," in which leagues would have as many as 16 teams. There are all sorts of implications with playoffs and crowning a national champion. Although that idea seems far-fetched, this sort of super-opening-weekend could scratch some of those itches I've been reading about.

In case you were wondering, here's what opening weekend would have looked like this year:

1. USC vs. Ohio State
    
2. Arizona State vs. Illinois
    
3. Oregon State vs. Michigan
    
4. Oregon vs. Wisconsin
    
5. UCLA vs. Penn State
    
6. Arizona vs. Iowa
    
7. California vs. Purdue
    
8. Washington State vs. Indiana
    
9. Stanford vs. Michigan State
    
10. Washington vs. Northwestern

That's a better day of football than certain stretches of the bowl season.

Note that the Big 10 is actually an 11-team conference, so Minnesota would be left out in the cold (insert your own joke here). It's a little like relegation in soccer -- if you don't make the top 10 in an 11-team league, maybe you should sit the next one out.

Comments

[Adam Rose]

Just to clarify, I was using conference record to rank the teams (overall record as a tie-breaker). In the SEC, Tennessee technically finished second because they won their regional division. That's another consideration organizers would have to deal with if larger conferences tried this idea out.