The Proposal

College football generates enough revenue to dictate how every other college sport is organized. It has driven this dynamic for the last fifteen years, and the map we have reflects that power.

A conference exists to organize competition among its members. For the entirety of the twentieth century, this meant geography. Programs within a manageable drive played each other in the sports they could support—football in the fall, basketball in the winter, track and baseball in the spring, swimming, wrestling, and tennis in their respective seasons. A conference championship was, by construction, a regional honor.

• The Pacific-12's predecessor conferences date to 1915.
• The Southeastern Conference was formed in 1932.
• The Big Ten goes back further, to 1896.

These are century-old institutions organized around the practical question of which schools could physically reach each other.

Television made this structure evolve, then mutate. Football's audience always outweighed any other college sport, and the rights to broadcast football games have been the largest line item in any conference's budget for as long as there have been broadcast rights to sell. But for most of the television era, the gap between football's revenue and the cost of running everything else was manageable inside a conference built on regional lines. Michigan's football dollars supported Michigan's other sports. The conference's job was to administer competition; the market's job was to pay Michigan for its football games; those two roles ran in parallel.

They now conflict. The scale of the football rights market has grown to the point where the structure of a conference is no longer a decision a conference's members get to make independently of the market. The Big Ten's 2023 media deal is worth over a billion dollars a year. The SEC distributes about the same amount to its members annually from its combined revenue streams. These figures are large enough to make any non-football consideration—travel, scheduling, the basic logistical question of whether volleyball teams can reasonably play a conference schedule—secondary. A conference that declined to organize itself around maximizing football revenue would be leaving hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the table for its members. No conference has declined. Some have missed out.

The Absurdity of the Modern Map

The Big Ten stretches from New Jersey to California. The Southeastern Conference covers four time zones. Stanford, whose 36 varsity sports programs are located in Northern California, plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The athletic departments running these programs are not ignorant of the cost; they understand that a volleyball team flying to Chapel Hill for a match is absurd. They are making the trade because the football revenue pays for the trip, and the football revenue is contingent on the conference structure that produces the trip.

The clearest demonstration of this trade-off is the Pac-12, a conference that had existed in one configuration or another since 1915 and was effectively dissolved in a two-year span.

• Summer 2022: UCLA and USC announce they are leaving for the Big Ten.
• Summer 2023: Colorado departs for the Big 12; Oregon and Washington follow UCLA and USC to the Big Ten; Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State announce for the Big 12 soon after.

By the end of the cycle, the twelve football-bearing programs of the Pac-12 had been scattered across three conferences, only one of them regional in any meaningful sense. The conference that remained held just two programs—Oregon State and Washington State—which played a full football schedule under a scheduling alliance with the Mountain West and scheduled their other sports through cooperation with other leagues.

The cost of this disruption landed on people who had no role in making the decisions. A football player would be prepared to travel across the country for a game and may have gone to a particular school for that exact privilege; a soccer player whose school joined the Big Ten did not get a choice. A century of school rivalries evaporated because the football rights market said they had to. Athletic departments that spent decades organizing swim meets and gymnastics schedules on West Coast trips now had to plan for their athletes to fly across the country. And the athletes themselves, whose seasons are structured around weekly competition and who generate none of the revenue that drove the realignment, absorbed the travel. The Pac-12's dissolution is the clearest case, but it is not the only one. The Big 12 and the ACC were reshaped in the same window by the same forces, and the American Athletic Conference lost what identity it had accumulated. The conference map looks the way it does because football revenue shifted, and everything else had to follow.

The CFP's expansion to twelve teams, announced in 2022 and first implemented in 2024, was sold as an answer to these pressures. The previous four-team playoff had, over its ten-year run, produced a field drawn from the SEC, the Big Ten, and a handful of outliers; the argument for expansion was that twelve teams would open access to the programs the four-team field had excluded.

In practice, the expansion does no such thing. The twelve-team field reserves automatic bids for the five highest-ranked conference champions and distributes the other seven spots through the same selection committee that ran the four-team era. A program like Boise State, which went 12-1 as the Mountain West champion and earned the No. 3 seed by virtue of the autobid structure, lost its one playoff game to Penn State by a margin consistent with the pre-expansion expectation for a Group of Five program against a Power Four program. The expansion added seats at a table whose rules didn't change. The programs that had been excluded under the four-team playoff remained structurally excluded under the twelve-team version. The committee was now debating the tenth and eleventh seeds rather than the third and fourth, but it was still the committee doing the debating, and the conferences whose television revenue underwrote the sport's economics were providing the candidates.

The diagnosis is structural. The conference system is being asked to organize competition across a set of sports whose economic scales differ by more than an order of magnitude, all under market pressure that rewards optimizing for the largest one. The result is a map that makes sense for football's television market and makes sense for nothing else. No amount of tuning inside the current structure resolves the tension, because the tension is the structure. The Big Ten cannot both be a regional conference and maximize its media-deal value; it has understandably chosen the latter, and every other sport it administers absorbs the consequences. The College Football Playoff cannot both be a committee-selected field drawn from the largest conferences and a merit-based postseason open to the best teams in the country; it has chosen the former, and the teams outside those conferences play for a bid that rarely exists.

A better arrangement is possible. It begins by separating the sport that generates the revenue from the structure that governs every other sport.

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The proposal is a league of twenty-four. Membership is earned by finishing in the top twenty of the previous year's standings, or by winning it on the field in a Promotion Playoff. The league plays its own schedule, decides its own champion through the College Football Playoff, and turns over four teams a year. Everything else in college football—the regional conferences, their championships, their other sports—returns to its prior shape.

The schedule is twelve games, matching the length of the traditional regular season. Ten games are played against other members of the Champions Conference. The remaining two are traditional rivalry games, which each team's home conference selects and which are allowed to be played against opponents both inside and outside the Champions Conference.

• The Game survives—Ohio State and Michigan, both Champions Conference members (one in Division I and the other in Division II), meet every year regardless of the rest of the schedule.
• The Iron Bowl also survives, even though Auburn is outside the Conference at its creation. Alabama, which is inside, spends one of its rivalry slots on Auburn, and the game is played.
• The Egg Bowl survives on the same logic: Ole Miss is inside the Champions Conference and Mississippi State, at its inception, is not.

These games are important enough that the proposal is built to preserve them. Ten-plus-two is the arithmetic that makes this preservation possible inside a twelve-game season.

What this arithmetic does not allow is a "buy game." Under the current arrangement, programs schedule at least one Saturday a year against an FCS opponent or a lower-tier Group of Five program; the host athletic department writes a check, the visiting team takes the money, and the home team typically takes an easy win. Under this proposal, no Champions Conference team has the opportunity to do that. Every week on the calendar is a week against another Champions Conference program or a rivalry game chosen for its stature.

The effect on strength of schedule is categorical: a Champions Conference season is designed to be exceptionally difficult to clear undefeated. Teams in this league will finish with losses that the sport's weakest Power Four teams routinely avoid. Currently, the country's best ten teams regularly finish 11–1 or 10–2 because they are playing ten different schedules of varying difficulty; their records look similar only because the schedules are unbalanced. In the Champions Conference, the schedules are balanced by construction. The top teams play each other, and the losses have to land somewhere.

• A 10–2 season becomes rare.
• An 11–1 season is exceptional.
• Undefeated becomes vanishingly rare.

The tenth team in the standings might well be 7–5. The record a team finishes with will mean exactly what it says. No one will need to act as the arbiter of strength of schedule.

The postseason features the top twelve teams in the standings, which sets the bracket for the College Football Playoff. Seeds one through four get byes, five through twelve play a first-round game on campus, and the bracket runs through the New Year's Six bowls to a national championship in mid-January. That is the entirety of the selection process. There is no committee meeting, no strength-of-schedule argument, and no debate about the twelfth seed. A team is placed exactly where its record dictates. The postseason is the decision that the rest of the proposal serves: if the bracket is going to seed itself, the league must have known members playing a known schedule so the standings can be read directly. There is no need to expand the existing 12-team playoff and invent a way to make the schedule work. Which is exactly what the Champions Conference does.

Membership turns over annually. The bottom two Champions Conference teams are relegated outright. The next two up play relegation games against teams coming out of a ten-team Promotion Playoff open to every FBS conference champion. Four teams change places each year, representing a turnover rate of roughly 17%. The Premier League is the closest available precedent; it turns over three of twenty teams, around 15%. The evidence from its three decades under that system shows the rate is high enough for the bottom of the table to carry real stakes every season, yet low enough for the league's identity to feel stable across years. This proposal tunes the number slightly higher because the candidate pool is larger and because college football tolerates roster churn better than a Premier League club does.

Outside the Champions Conference, the proposal assumes a return to the conference map as it stood around 2012. The Pac-12 is reconstituted. Texas and Oklahoma return to the Big 12. The Big Ten no longer stretches from Piscataway to Los Angeles. Cal and Stanford return home to the Pacific Coast, saying goodbye to the Atlantic. Once football revenue is no longer the organizing force of conference membership—because football revenue now follows the Champions Conference rather than individual conferences—leagues are free to serve their other sports, which is what they were built to do. The 2012 map is not the only defensible baseline, but it is a stable one.

The inaugural twenty-four must be selected by a method that is not initially merit-based, because there is no prior Champions Conference season to rank against. The top of the final CFP committee ranking is one method; a one-time selection committee is another; both yield roughly the same twenty-four teams. Any program that feels wrongly excluded from the initial field can quickly earn its way in within one or two promotion cycles. This is the only part of the proposal that is not self-correcting on first principles, and it corrects itself within a handful of years.

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Take a Champions Conference program—Oregon, for example—and ask what it knows about its next season the day the previous one ends. By that evening, the program knows all twelve of its opponents. Not the dates, not the broadcast windows, and not who will be ranked where come October, but the exact twelve teams it will play: seven from its division, three from the other two divisions, and two rivalry games. The schedule is derived. The previous season's standings produce the next season's divisions, the divisions produce the intra-division and cross-division games, and the program's home conference selects its rivalries. From the program's point of view, the season's architecture is settled before the offseason even begins.

Schedule Slot	Component	Determination Mechanism
Games 1–7	7 Division Games	Full round-robin within snake-drafted division
Games 8–10	3 Cross-Division Games	Mirrored rotation (matched seeds across divisions)
Games 11–12	2 Preserved Rivalries	Selected by each program's home conference

The league is arranged into three divisions of eight teams each: Divisions I, II, and III. They are neither regional nor permanent. At the end of every season, the standings are used to reconstitute the divisions for the following year through a snake draft. The top team in the league is placed in Division I, the second in II, the third in III, the fourth in III again, the fifth in II, the sixth in I, and so on through all twenty-four. This pattern produces three divisions whose total strength, measured by previous-season records, is as close to equal as the math allows. A team's division changes from one year to the next depending on where it finished the year before.

Divisions are a scheduling device. They exist because the league needs to carve twenty-four teams into groups that play each other, and three groups of eight is the arrangement that makes a seven-game round-robin fit inside a ten-game intra-conference schedule. A team plays every other team in its division once, and then plays three games against teams in the other divisions to reach ten games. The model is borrowed in spirit from European club football, where the intuition is that the schedule should be as close to a full round-robin as the calendar allows. Because the Champions Conference cannot manage a full twenty-three-game round-robin inside a twelve-game regular season, snake-drafted divisions serve as the structural compromise that preserves that round-robin logic. This compromise also carries a side benefit: because divisions reshuffle annually, no division accumulates a permanent competitive identity or permanent grievance. A program might be in Division II this year and Division I next year; a division is simply the group of seven teams your program plays that autumn.

The three cross-division games are assigned by a principle the league calls mirrored rotation. Each team's slot within its division—Division I's top-seeded team is Slot 1, its second-seeded team Slot 2, and so on through Slot 8—determines two of its cross-division opponents directly. Slot 1 in Division I plays Slot 1 in Division II and Slot 1 in Division III. Slot 5 plays Slot 5 and Slot 5. The third cross-division game rotates through the remaining opponents on a predetermined cycle that covers every cross-division matchup over roughly five or six seasons.

This mirroring produces a deliberate consequence: the best teams in each division play each other every year, and the weakest teams in each division do the same, with the rule holding true at every slot in between. A top-seeded program cannot avoid the top of the other two divisions. A bottom-seeded program cannot escape the bottom. At every position in the standings, the games that matter most for that tier are built directly into the schedule.

The two rivalry games are the portion of the schedule determined by each team's home conference. A Champions Conference team remains a member of its home conference for every non-football purpose, and for football, it retains two dates on which its conference assigns a rivalry opponent. These games are coordinated by the home conferences, which best understand which matchups matter to their members. The Iron Bowl is scheduled because it is the Iron Bowl. The Egg Bowl is scheduled because it is the Egg Bowl. A conference whose membership includes one Champions Conference team and one non-Champions Conference team schedules the rivalry as a cross-membership game, and the game happens regardless of which side of the league boundary the rival sits on.

The Double-Rivalry Edge Case

An interesting edge case emerges: when two teams are historical rivals and happen to draw each other through the cross-division rotation, they play twice that season. The second game can be played as a revenge game for the first game's loser. While this happens rarely, when it does, the sport gains a second Ohio State–Michigan matchup in a single year. The rules accommodate this phenomenon rather than forbid it. The Big Ten could choose to schedule alternate rivalry games for Ohio State and Michigan if it preferred.

What these twelve slots produce is a schedule in which every single game matters. The seven division games matter because they determine the league's most concentrated competitive picture—a team's performance against the seven opponents it plays in a full round-robin. The three cross-division games matter because of what mirrored rotation does with them: a top-seeded program's cross-division games are against other top-seeded programs, moving the needle at the top of the standings directly. The two rivalry games matter on their own terms, which is why they are preserved. There is no thirteenth game; there is no fourteenth. Every game on the calendar is either intra-league or a preserved rivalry, and a team's record at the end of the season reflects exactly those games, weighted by nothing except how many times the team won.

That is the core structural point. The standings at the end of a Champions Conference regular season are produced by a set of games that was balanced at the start of the season—division round-robins, mirrored cross-divisions, and rivalries—resulting in a final record that is immediately legible.

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A closed league is a league whose competitive questions get smaller every year. The programs inside it play for championships; the programs outside it play for something less. Over time, the gap between the two becomes self-reinforcing because the programs inside secure the schedules, the revenue, and the recruiting access that make staying inside easier, while the programs outside get the opposite. The Champions Conference would face this problem acutely. A league of twenty-four teams selected on merit in its first year is a league whose merit case lasts exactly one year; in year two, that case needs to be remade. The mechanism for remaking it is promotion and relegation.

Four teams change places annually. Two are promoted outright, two are relegated outright, and two additional places are decided by head-to-head matches between the bottom of the Champions Conference and the top of the Promotion Playoff. The net effect is four teams out, four teams in—roughly 17% of the league—every single year.

Relegation is the simpler half of the mechanism. The twenty-third and twenty-fourth teams in the final Champions Conference standings are relegated automatically. There is no final game to save themselves, no appeal, and no tiebreaker involving strength of schedule or signature wins. The league is a closed set of games, the standings are the definitive result of those games, and the bottom two positions carry the exact consequences the structure assigns them. Those programs return to their home conferences for the following football season, rejoining their conference-mates for a schedule that now includes football alongside every other sport.

The twenty-first and twenty-second teams get a second chance. They play in The Boundary Games. Their opponents come out of the Promotion Playoff, which is where the other half of the mechanism lives.

The Promotion Playoff is open to the champion of every FBS conference outside the Champions Conference. There are ten conferences under the conference map this proposal assumes—the six power conferences with programs outside the Champions Conference in any given year, plus four conferences that exist today and would continue to exist under this proposal: the Mountain West, the Sun Belt, Conference USA, and the Mid-American Conference. Every one of those ten champions automatically qualifies. There is no committee, no at-large bid, and no selection meeting. If a conference crowns a champion, that champion is in the playoff.

The ten teams are seeded by a transparent formula based on regular-season performance—weighting winning percentage, strength of schedule, quality of wins, and conference-championship game performance—and the bracket runs single-elimination over three December weekends.

• The top six seeds receive byes; the bottom four play a play-in round (#7 v #8, #9 v #10).
• The two play-in winners join the top six seeds in the quarterfinals, followed by the semifinals.
• The two semifinal winners are promoted directly to the Champions Conference for the following season.
• The two semifinal losers survive to play in The Boundary Games.

The Boundary Games serve as the joint where the two systems meet. On the first Saturday in January, at neutral sites, two games are played: the Champions Conference 22nd-place team versus the Promotion Playoff 3rd-place team, and the Champions Conference 21st-place team versus the Promotion Playoff 4th-place team. The winner earns—or retains—a Champions Conference spot; the loser goes down, or stays down. The games fall on the Saturday between the CFP quarterfinals and semifinals, which is deliberate. The weekend already commands national attention for college football, and the Boundary Games give that attention something structurally meaningful to latch onto. By Saturday night, the following year's Champions Conference field is set.

The mechanism is intentionally asymmetric. An automatic promotion is won by a team that advanced twice against peers of similar standing in a tournament format designed around its own conferences. Conversely, an automatic relegation is earned by a team that finished last or second-to-last across an entire Champions Conference regular season. The playoff route up is a sprint; the route down is a season-long verdict. Between them, The Boundary Games offer a single game—one afternoon, one result—that decides the marginal cases. The mechanism is neither a pure tournament nor a pure meritocracy; it is a hybrid that treats each side of the boundary on its own terms.

The Independent Problem

One program needs to be addressed specifically here because its historic arrangement does not fit the structure cleanly: Notre Dame. Notre Dame has been independent in football since 1887, and since 2014 it has played a partial ACC schedule while remaining outside any conference for football purposes. Under this proposal, Notre Dame joins the ACC fully for football and every other sport. If Notre Dame is in the Champions Conference, the ACC is its home conference for relegation purposes, and its rivalry-game assignments come through the ACC like every other member. Remember that those rivalry games do not have to be ACC opponents. If Notre Dame is outside the Champions Conference in a given year, it competes for the ACC championship and, if it wins, enters the Promotion Playoff like any other conference champion. The rule is unyielding: access to the Champions Conference pathway requires conference membership, because the pathway runs through conferences. Notre Dame's independence has been a hard-won exception for over a century, but this proposal treats it as an exception the new structure cannot preserve. Whether Notre Dame accepts that trade is a separate question.

The same rule applies to UConn, the only other current FBS football independent. UConn does not command the broadcast arrangements or football-specific leverage that make the Notre Dame question so difficult, but the structural requirement is identical: affiliate with a football-sponsoring conference, or forgo access to the Champions Conference pathway entirely. The proposal treats the two programs symmetrically, even if the negotiation each faces is vastly different.

Choosing to have four teams change places annually is a decision that rests on historical evidence. The Premier League, as the closest available precedent, turns over three of twenty teams (15%) each year. This structure has held for over three decades, producing both a stable league identity and consequential late-season matches at the bottom of the table. The Champions Conference tunes the rate slightly higher, to about 17%, because a larger candidate pool warrants slightly faster circulation and because American college football tolerates roster turnover—through graduation, the transfer portal, and recruiting—more readily than a European professional soccer club does. The number is not sacrosanct. Three teams would be defensible, five would be defensible, and any future spec revision could adjust the rate based on what the first several seasons produce. Four is the number the proposal rests on because it satisfies the arithmetic: two automatic promotions, two automatic relegations, and two Boundary Games to resolve the marginal cases.

What this annual turnover produces is a league that stays true to the best twenty-four teams. This is not the best twenty-four of 2024, locked in by a first-year selection and insulated from challenge for a decade; it is the best twenty-four as of this season's end, re-examined every year by the standings themselves. A program that joins the Champions Conference and then fails to compete at that level goes down. A program that wins its conference and clears a December tournament comes up. Over time, the league and the conferences that fuel it find a natural balance. The boundary is alive, and the league behind it is as legible as its standings.

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A postseason's job is to identify the national champion from a field with a legitimate claim to the title. Everything else—the seeding process, the bracket shape, the number of teams, the television distribution—is detail. The hard question is whether the field is the right field. The current College Football Playoff answers this question through a selection committee that meets for roughly two months each season, publishes weekly rankings, and on the first Sunday in December produces a final twelve-team bracket. The Champions Conference version answers it through the standings.

The field is the top twelve teams in the Champions Conference standings.

• Seeds 1–4: Receive first-round byes.
• Seeds 5–12: Play first-round games on the campuses of the higher seeds.
• The Bracket: Runs through the New Year's Six bowls to a national championship in mid-January.

The bracket's shape is identical to the CFP format that first ran in 2024. The difference is in how that bracket gets filled.

The selection committee disbands. The weekly committee rankings disappear, and with them the entire cottage industry dedicated to explaining and contesting them—the mid-November column debating why a two-loss SEC team is ranked ahead of a one-loss Big Ten team, the Tuesday-night television segment dissecting the previous evening's release, and the running debate about which set of résumé criteria the committee is prioritizing this week. The automatic-bid argument disappears—whether the twelfth spot should go to the highest-ranked Group of Five champion or be reallocated to an at-large, an argument that in the 2024 CFP's first year drew enough sustained coverage that the CFP altered the autobid structure for 2026. The conference-championship-as-tiebreaker argument disappears, because conference championships no longer exist for Champions Conference teams. The strength-of-schedule argument disappears, because every Champions Conference team plays a balanced Champions Conference schedule. The eye test disappears. The signature-win argument disappears. The "what have you done lately" argument disappears. The entire vocabulary the sport has developed over the past decade to litigate its own postseason evaporates, because there is nothing left to litigate.

What remains is the standings. The top twelve, by record, compose the CFP field. Tiebreakers exist—overall record, followed by division record, head-to-head, and point differential—and they resolve edge cases within the league's mechanical framework without appeal to external judgment. A team in the playoff is a team that has earned a better Champions Conference record, or has held a better record under a clearer set of criteria, than the teams that missed out. No one argues about it because there is nothing to argue about.

Is a standings-based postseason legitimate in the way the committee-based postseason attempts to be? The committee's charter is to identify the twelve best teams in college football; the standings' charter is to identify the top twelve finishers in a twenty-four-team league. These are not identical goals, and the proposal depends on making the case that the second approach is a truer answer to the sport's postseason dilemma than the first.

The Champions Conference schedule is built, by design, to be balanced. Every team plays a seven-game division round-robin against a division whose total strength was selected to approximate the other divisions' total strength. Every team plays three cross-division games, two of them against the same slot in the other divisions—the top of each division playing the top of the others, the bottom playing the bottom. Every team plays two rivalry games chosen by its home conference for their historical stature. The resulting schedule lacks the variance that exists across college football today, where an 11–1 record from one conference is a different achievement than an 11–1 record from another. A Champions Conference 11–1 is a true 11–1, earned against the same caliber of opponent that every other league member faced. The ordinal position in the standings therefore means exactly what it says. The top twelve is the top twelve not because a committee has certified it, but because the schedule that produced it was built to yield a ranking that can be read directly.

This also means the bracket is set the moment the final regular-season game ends. There is no selection show. No committee convenes on the first Sunday in December to deliberate over brackets drafted on whiteboards. The regular season ends on a Saturday, the standings are final that evening, and by Sunday morning the CFP bracket emerges as a mechanical consequence of Saturday's results—the top four bye teams, the five-through-twelve first-round pairings, and the sites of the first-round games are all determined by the seeds. Championship weekend, under the current arrangement, is organized around the existential question of who is in. Under this proposal, that question is already settled, and the weekend is organized around the question of how the games will go, which is what a championship weekend is supposed to be about.

What We Forfeit: The Subjective Outlier

There is one thing the committee-selected CFP could do that the standings-based format cannot. A committee can include a team from outside the field based on a subjective judgment call. Every season for the last decade has produced at least one plausible candidate for that kind of grace.

• Take 2023 Florida State, undefeated in the ACC and left out by the four-team committee in the final year before expansion.
• Consider 2017 UCF, undefeated in the American and not seriously considered for the four-team playoff of its era.
• Look at 2014 TCU and Baylor, Big 12 co-champions excluded in favor of Ohio State.

Each of these was, at the time and in retrospect, both a defensible committee decision and a defensible public outrage; a reader's perspective depends entirely on their priors.

Under this proposal, none of those teams would get that committee consideration. They would get the Promotion Playoff, which serves as a path to next year's Champions Conference rather than this year's CFP. The tradeoff is real. The Promotion Playoff adds structure and legitimacy to an access mechanism that currently does not exist, and it does so at the cost of the committee's flexibility to honor an exceptional, single-season case in the exact season it occurs. The proposal argues that this tradeoff is worth it, because that flexibility has historically been exercised inconsistently, and a true access mechanism has historically not existed.

What the standings-based format offers in exchange is verifiability. Anyone can read the Champions Conference standings at the end of the regular season. Anyone can see the top twelve. Anyone can verify that the bracket is exactly what the standings produced. The committee version of the CFP has, over its history, required its participants to trust that thirteen well-credentialed people in a hotel room have arrived at the correct field; the standings version requires its participants to trust only that wins and losses have been counted correctly. It is a smaller, more transparent request, and the postseason that rests upon it is stronger.

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The proposal is often read as a radical restructuring, and in mechanical terms, it is. It creates a new conference. It replaces the postseason's selection mechanism. It introduces promotion and relegation to a sport that has never operated on those terms. But this mechanical radicalism is contained to the parts of college athletics that are currently under the most strain. The rest of the sport—which is to say, the vast majority of it—the proposal leaves largely intact.

The rivalries stay. All of them.

• Ohio State and Michigan in The Game.
• Alabama and Auburn in the Iron Bowl.
• Ole Miss and Mississippi State in the Egg Bowl.
• Army and Navy, a game older than nearly every program in the Champions Conference and most of the Group of Five.
• Oklahoma and Texas in the Red River Rivalry.
• Florida and Georgia in The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
• Iowa and Iowa State.
• Oregon and Oregon State.

Whatever rivalry a program has—and nearly every FBS program has at least one—the proposal's two-rivalry-game rule preserves it. The rule accommodates in-conference rivalries, cross-conference rivalries, and cross-membership rivalries where one team is in the Champions Conference and the other is not.

This is not a play toward sentimentality; it is structural preservation. The current arrangement talks about tradition while actively dismantling it. The Pac-12's dissolution ended, among other things, the Washington–Washington State rivalry's meaning as a conference game—the two programs are no longer guaranteed to play each other, and the game's context has changed regardless of what the fans wanted. The Backyard Brawl between West Virginia and Pittsburgh was interrupted for over a decade by realignment and was only restored as a non-conference scheduling courtesy. Texas and Texas A&M went unplayed from 2011 to 2024 because Texas A&M left the Big 12 for the SEC and the schools could not find a non-conference scheduling arrangement. Realignment has been quietly eliminating rivalries for fifteen years.

The proposal reverses this erosion. Each Champions Conference program dedicates two schedule slots specifically to its rivalries, and each program's home conference is the entity that selects them. This ensures that the rivalries that matter to the programs are the ones that get played, rather than the ones that can be accommodated between television-driven scheduling obligations.

The conferences stay for every sport that isn't football, and for football in the years a program finds itself outside the Champions Conference. Michigan's volleyball team plays a traditional Big Ten volleyball schedule against opponents within a day's drive—Michigan State, Ohio State, Illinois, Purdue, Indiana, and Wisconsin. It does not have to fly to Piscataway or Los Angeles, because the Big Ten is no longer structured around maximizing football revenue, because football revenue no longer drives the Big Ten. Stanford's swim team competes in a Pac-12 reconstituted along its historical lines. The ACC becomes a conference of schools near the Atlantic Coast.

Every non-football sport gets back the regional conference structure it was originally built for. The financial cost of a conference schedule drops. Athletes get to sleep in their own beds on weeknights. Athletic departments can plan seasons on travel budgets proportional to real regional revenue rather than in excess of it.

The specific conference map the proposal assumes—roughly the arrangement that existed around 2012—is one choice among several debatable options, and the exact year is not critical. The underlying claim is that a map predating the recent football-revenue distortion is a better starting point than a map that is the direct product of that distortion. The 2012 version preserves the ACC's absorption of the old Big East's football schools, which made sense on football-quality grounds and has held up since; it undoes the 2021-through-2024 expansions that created the current logistical incoherence. Someone else might draw the line in 2004 or 2014 and be reasonable. The important structural fact is that once football revenue no longer drives the conferences, the conferences are free to organize themselves around what their other sports actually need. The 2012 map is the proposal's best guess at what that baseline looks like. It is a starting point.

The regular-season calendar stays. Saturdays in September, October, and November still look like Saturdays in September, October, and November. Champions Conference teams play a twelve-game regular season; non-Champions Conference teams play their traditional conference schedules. Rivalry weekend, the final regular-season Saturday, remains rivalry weekend, and under this proposal, it becomes more important rather than less. Rivalry games occupy two of the twelve slots on every Champions Conference team's calendar, concentrated in prominent positions, and the weekend that traditionally closes the regular season is the one around which several of them are naturally anchored. The overall cadence of the sport's autumn—the long Saturday of games that begins at noon Eastern and ends with a late-night game in Hawai'i, the slow narrowing of the season's questions from dozens of teams to a handful, and the week-by-week accumulation of the standings that will determine the postseason—is unchanged. What changes inside that cadence is what the games are for. The cadence itself is preserved.

Conference championships stay for the conferences that crown them. With this, there is a subtle but important distinction. Champions Conference teams do not play for conference championships; their championship is the College Football Playoff itself, and the path to the CFP runs through the Champions Conference standings. However, every other FBS conference still hosts a championship game, and under this proposal, that championship game takes on a function it currently lacks: the winner enters the Promotion Playoff. A Mountain West championship now carries stakes beyond a minor bowl bid and a trophy: a berth in the ten-team playoff that could put the winner in the Champions Conference next year. The stakes are larger than they are now. The same is true for the Sun Belt championship, the Mid-American championship, the American championship, and any other FBS conference. These championships matter more than they currently do, because they become the gateway to the sport's highest tier.

Regional character, which the sport has been bleeding for fifteen years, comes back. This is partly a consequence of the items above—if the conferences reorganize regionally for everything other than football, and if football in its elite form is separated out into its own structure, then the rest of college athletics naturally returns to the geographic logic it was built on. But it is also its own reward, because regional character is what produces rivalries in the first place. Proximity produces repetition; repetition produces familiarity; familiarity produces the accumulated mutual knowledge that makes a rivalry worth the name. ACC basketball has the rivalries it has because Duke and North Carolina have been playing each other twice a year for a century, and because both schools sit just a half-hour's drive apart. The sport lost something when the Big East basketball of the 1980s and 1990s fragmented, and it is currently losing more as the remaining conferences dissolve into sprawling national constructs. The proposal restores the conditions under which new rivalries can accumulate and old ones can be sustained.

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A proposal that asks for structural change must account for what that change takes from its participants. What follows is that accounting. It is real, several of the things the current arrangement provides would not survive the transition, and the people who value those elements have a legitimate claim to be heard.

• The Outlier Case: A team like 2017 UCF, undefeated in the American, does not get CFP consideration under this proposal in the exact season that undefeated run occurs. Instead, they get the Promotion Playoff, which serves as a path to the following year's Champions Conference. This is a real constraint, and it is one the proposal accepts in exchange for the predictability of a standings-based field.
• The SEC and Big Ten Title Games: The SEC Championship Game has been, for most of its thirty-three years, one of the most consequential single games in the college football calendar. The Big Ten Championship Game has, over its shorter history, assumed a similar status. These games have been, collectively, among the three or four most valuable individual properties in the sport. Under this proposal, the programs that play in them—the SEC's top-tier members, the Big Ten's, and the occasional ACC or Big 12 power—will no longer contest their traditional conferences' championships. The specific spectacle of Alabama vs. Georgia for the SEC championship, with an immediate CFP berth on the line, is replaced by a bracket this proposal argues is more legitimate.
• Program-Conference Identity: For most of the sport's history, a Power Four football program's identity has been tied to its conference in a way that matters to fans, alumni, and the program itself. Ohio State football and the Big Ten have been, for a hundred years, inseparable. Under this proposal, they are bifurcated. Ohio State remains a Big Ten program for basketball, baseball, volleyball, and every other sport the school sponsors—and for football, in the rare years the program might fall outside the Champions Conference. But for football in the years Ohio State is inside the Champions Conference, the program's football identity runs through the Champions Conference and not the Big Ten.
• Realignment as Corporate Strategy: Under the current arrangement, a program that has outgrown its conference—or that calculates its football prospects will improve materially by joining a stronger one—can pack up and leave. Oklahoma and Texas moved to the SEC in 2024 because the SEC's revenue and competitive environment were more favorable to their football ambitions than the Big 12's. USC and UCLA moved to the Big Ten for equivalent reasons. Under this proposal, that corporate mobility ceases to exist. A program improves its football situation by winning more games, not by changing conferences, because the Champions Conference is the only destination that matters and membership is earned on the field.
• The Fragile Playoff Stakes of September: Under the current system, a Power Four team's regular season carries implicit, fragile playoff stakes: any individual loss can be the difference between making the CFP field and missing it entirely, because the field is committee-selected and sensitive to loss count. Under this proposal, a Champions Conference team's regular season carries standings stakes—a loss moves you within the top twelve, or from the top twelve to the teens, but less commonly from inside the playoff to outside the league. A fan who has enjoyed the particular narrative arc of an SEC powerhouse losing in September and falling out of the playoff picture by October is going to find that arc redistributed into different shapes. Structurally, this is a gain. Narratively, for some traditional audiences, it is a loss.

The Hardest Loss: Institutional Revenue Stabilization

The most concrete loss is revenue for programs that fall on the wrong side of the Champions Conference line. This is perhaps where the proposal faces the most institutional strain, because the mechanics are specific and the implications are serious. Take Mississippi State. Mississippi State has been a member of the Southeastern Conference since 1932 and currently receives a full share of the SEC's football media deal as part of the conference's revenue distribution. Under the current system, Mississippi State's football revenue is secure—meaningful enough to sustain a Power Four athletic department with every facility and support structure that entails—regardless of their on-field competitiveness.

Under this proposal, Mississippi State, in a year they are outside the Champions Conference, resides in the regional-form SEC, whose football-only revenue is distributed among its non-Champions Conference members and is smaller in absolute terms than the current SEC's all-members-pooled football distribution. Mississippi State's football revenue goes down. Their path to Champions Conference revenue runs through the Promotion Playoff, which requires winning the SEC's conference championship among its non-CC members in a year when most of the SEC's traditional powers are elsewhere. The revenue math is, for a program in Mississippi State's position, harder under this proposal than under the current system.

The spec provides some mitigation for this: The Conference Development Pool, modeled on the NCAA basketball tournament's unit-distribution system, channels a portion of Champions Conference revenue back to the conferences that send teams to the Promotion Playoff, distributed across all the conference's members over a rolling six-year window. This smooths the revenue loss for conferences whose members occasionally qualify for the Promotion Playoff but don't currently produce permanent Champions Conference programs. This mitigation is real. However, it may not be sufficient at the specific program level to replace the current SEC or Big Ten distribution for a program that sits permanently in the bottom third of its conference. Mississippi State will make less money under this proposal than they do now in most plausible years.

The argument for why this cost is acceptable is structural: the current arrangement's revenue concentration is itself the force driving the realignment. A structural problem cannot be resolved if the structure's central feature—the concentration of football revenue in a handful of conferences regardless of performance—is preserved. The proposal distributes football revenue differently because it has to, shifting the financial windfall from the programs currently at the bottom of the Power Four to the programs that earn their way into the Champions Conference. Mississippi State loses revenue share; a program like Boise State, if and when they earn Champions Conference membership, gains it. Over time, across all programs and all cycles of promotion and relegation, the aggregate football revenue is distributed on the basis of the Champions Conference's meritocratic membership rather than on the basis of which conferences consolidated first in the early 2020s. The proposal's revenue structure is fairer because it is determined by the same mechanism that determines everything else in sports—winning games.

The final loss is the stability of incumbency for programs that get relegated. A program that has been a Power Four football institution for fifty years and finds itself relegated after one bad season under this proposal loses a level of security that the current system would never take from them. They are, after relegation, outside the Champions Conference. Their immediate revenue falls. Their recruiting environment changes, because recruits who select a program partly for its national television platform now see a program temporarily stripped of that platform. Their path back runs through a December tournament against other conference champions, which is a different competitive structure than the one they have been operating in and is not guaranteed to return them quickly. Incumbency is valued, and relegation removes it. Someone who instinctively feels that sports leagues should be stable—that a program with a half-century of Power Four history should have some protection from a bad season—is responding to something real, and the proposal does not honor that feeling. Relegation is intended to have teeth.

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A design document with no open questions is either a small design document or a dishonest one. The Champions Conference proposal is a substantial restructuring of an institutionally complex sport, and several of its provisions remain unsettled. Some are unsettled because they depend on negotiations that the proposal, as a design document, cannot conduct. Some are unsettled because the proposal has identified a problem and described a logical starting point without claiming that starting point is the final answer.

• The Notre Dame Standoff: The proposal asks Notre Dame to surrender its independence in exchange for access to a new league and a standings-based path to a national championship. Notre Dame may refuse the trade. The proposal's position is that the rule applies regardless—access runs through conferences, and a program that chooses not to affiliate with a conference chooses not to compete for a Champions Conference spot. If Notre Dame refuses, they play an independent football schedule outside the new structure; they cannot enter the Promotion Playoff, and they do not compete for the CFP because the CFP is Champions Conference only. This is a real consequence, and the proposal does not soften it. It is bound up with a historic NBC broadcast arrangement and an institutional identity cultivated over a century.
• The Inaugural Selection: The proposal's first Champions Conference season has no prior Champions Conference standings to rank against, so a one-time on-boarding method is required. The Champions Conference spec names two main candidates: taking the top twenty-four of the final CFP committee ranking from the year before launch, or convening a one-time selection committee specifically for this purpose. Both yield roughly the same twenty-four programs, which is why the choice matters less than it initially appears.
• The Implementation Timeline: The proposal is a design document; it describes a completed end state. It does not map out a transition plan because that transition requires legal and corporate decisions this proposal cannot make independently: how existing conference-media contracts are unwound or allowed to expire, what happens to bowl commitments signed under current rules, and what specific legal structures govern the new entity's founding.
• Player Compensation: College football's financial relationship with its players has been in active transformation for five years. The NIL framework permits what it previously forbade; the transfer portal operates under rules that shift every semester; federal court decisions have repeatedly reshaped the sport's legal terrain; and the NCAA's authority to set player-facing rules is itself the subject of ongoing litigation. The Champions Conference proposal assumes that a stable working framework around these questions will exist, but it does not specify one. The core mechanisms—the promotion-and-relegation boundary, the competitive-balance snake draft, and the centralized revenue distribution—work under any plausible arrangement of player compensation, but they are not neutral to the format chosen.
• The Promotion Playoff Seeding Formula: The spec proposes a multi-factored formula—weighting winning percentage, strength of schedule, quality wins, and conference-championship-game performance—and names it as a starting point rather than a settled answer. The ten conferences whose champions enter the Promotion Playoff differ enough in profile that any formula will advantage some conferences' resumes over others.

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What you have just read is one person's structural proposal for a sport that belongs to millions. I built it carefully, over an extended period, because I believe the current arrangement is failing in ways that the sport's legacy institutions are not equipped to fix from the inside. I believe a restructured league with transparent, merit-based membership is the evolution the sport needs to survive the next twenty years. But this proposal remains a design document, not a consensus document, and it acquires its usefulness only when other people engage with it on its own terms.

There are three specific things a reader persuaded by this proposal, or usefully skeptical of it, can do next.

1. Write to the project. The commissioner email, commissioner@thetwenty-four.com, is the inbox where the proposal's author reads everything that arrives. Detailed, granular objections are welcome. Refinements to specific league mechanisms are welcome. Challenges to the revenue math, the 2012 conference-map baseline assumption, the Notre Dame rule, the Promotion Playoff seeding formula, the competitive-balance snake draft, or any of the seven losses accounted for previously, all are welcome. An objection that produces a better version of the proposal is a contribution.

2. Engage on structural merits. Engage the proposal on its structural merits rather than on the question of whether it "could" happen. The sport's current institutions have bureaucratic reasons to resist structural change, and a reader whose immediate response is "this would never happen" is correctly describing the political environment without engaging the design itself. The proposal's question is simpler: Is this design better?

3. Share the proposal. Share this proposal with people who think about fixing broken systems. The essay's persuasive force lies in whether the full argument holds together across all its chapters, and the test of that validity is whether a smart reader finishes the text and feels compelled to show it to someone else. A proposal that no one talks about is a private manifesto. This one is published for the opposite reason.

A restructured college football world featuring a twenty-four-team Champions Conference, with a transparent, high-stakes path up and down, is a better sport than the one currently emerging from a decade of corporate realignment. It preserves the traditions the current arrangement is in the process of dismantling, and it fixes the structural problems the current arrangement is failing to address from within. The proposal is ambitious. It is not implausible. The sport needs a structural alternative to its current trajectory. This is one.

I would love to hear what you think.