Good morning, Uni Watchers, and a Happy Hump Day to one and all.
I was recently contacted by long-time reader Greg Seher, who has a pretty fun set of not just college football concepts, but a neat way to align conferences going forward. Greg’s done eighty (!) designs for the eighty teams in his realignment, along with some thoughts on College Football’s future now that we’ve moved into the 12-team playoff era. In Part, he wrote, “Coming up on the first expanded playoffs, I came up with a D1 realignment that helps organize the system better. Resetting the looks for the 80 teams that make the cut to D1, some looks recognizable with minimal changes, really about creating a standard brand for every school instead of all the alternates and one-off designs each year.”
I’m going to do this in several parts, and today’s article will contain uni concepts for two Conferences, as Greg has aligned them, in alphabetical order. There will be eight conferences covered in total.
(You may recall when I was still doing weekends earlier this year, Greg shared his NHL Concepts with us. I’m only linking the final article in the series, since that will give you links to all of his concepts.)
Anyhoo. Here’s Greg with Part I of his NCAA Football Concepts.
by Greg Seher
NCAA D-1A Football
I’m trying to consolidate NCAA top-tier football here. Dropping down to 80 schools in 8 conferences. Simply put, win your conference, you get into the 12 team playoff. With 10 schools in each conference you can play all 9 conference opponents, leaving 3 non-conference games. The rest of current 1-A schools who didn’t make the cut would move down to 1-AA.
This is basically taking the existing power 4 conferences with their realignments (67 schools), plus Notre Dame, the leftovers of the Pac12, and the most likely schools that would move up. Conferences like the Big Ten and SEC retain their traditional schools, ACC, Big XII, and Pac 10 look pretty similar, a football sort of Big East, and stronger versions of AAC and MWC. No need for conference championship games with all teams in a conference playing each other.
For the playoff, the top 4 seeds get a bye, and seeds 5 thru 12 play first-round games in their home stadiums based on seeding. At large bids would always be ranked 9 thru 12. The national championship game would be at a neutral site.
To keep the bowl tradition alive I would use 8 big bowl games for neutral site big matchups at the start of the season, which has already started to become a thing. Conferences would have scheduling pairs based on the bowls, so the top 2 teams from each conference play in a big time week 1 (or week zero) matchup, the remaining 8 teams in each conference would pair off with teams from the corresponding conferences as well based on final standings the previous season (for example, the SEC and ACC would have a Peach Bowl matchup for their top teams, so likewise you’d pair teams lower in the standings from those conferences as well). That would leave every team two games on the schedule that are not conference or bowl pairing matchups. The bowls would be Orange (ACC vs East in Miami), Peach (SEC vs ACC in Atlanta), Sugar (SEC vs Big XII in New Orleans), Cotton (Big XII vs AAC in Arlington), Fiesta (MWC vs PAC in Glendale), Rose (PAC vs Big Ten in Pasadena), Citrus Bowl (AAC vs MWC in Orlando), and Liberty Bowl (East vs Big Ten and move it back to Philadelphia).
Uniform-wise, the idea is to drop all of these crazy one-off designs and create a solid, identifiable look for each school, home and away. With 80 schools, and keeping their traditional school colors (and uniform design for schools who have a legit standard), it isn’t easy to make all of these schools unique-looking, but I did as much as I could.
American Athletic Conference
Taking 4 of the stronger current AAC schools in Memphis, USF, and Tulane and adding back in UCF, SMU, Louisville, and Houston. Arkansas, Missouri, and TCU fill out the rest of the lineup, maintaining some rivalries and fitting in geographically.
Arkansas
Atlantic Coast Conference
Not the full classic ACC lineup, but maintains the modern conference schools that fit regionally in the south Atlantic.
Clemson
Readers? What say you?
Am I the only one who noticed all of these are pretty much the same as the current ones and the realignment is horrible! When are arkansas, and louisville going to the AAC? Missouri and Smu aren’t either! Half of the normal AAC teams aren’t even there! Whoever made this had no idea.
Exactly! This is the least realistic realignment I have ever seen! The uni redesigns are almost exactly the same too! They are also so simple it would be nice to see some alternate helmets and uniforms because like it or not they are a part of college football culture.
Noped out of this as soon as I saw TCU to the AAC. LOL.
There’s also zero chance of TCU ever using “Texas Christian” on a uniform. They’ve gone whole hog as marketing themselves as just “TCU”, regardless of what the letters represent.
Team names on the front of every jersey? No. Another example of the folly of doing these mass concept sets — you fall into creative ruts and what makes sense historically for one team (in this case, say, Michigan State) looks ridiculous when applied to others (say, Michigan).
Hi there, point wasn’t necessarily redesign, but rather get rid of all the alternates and create a signature look for every team, in some cases, the teams already have a signature look, so they are staying the same.
As far as the realignment, cutting down to 80 teams is mostly Big Ten, Big XII, SEC, and ACC schools, which is 67 teams at the moment. The additional 13 are from MWC, AAC, and PAC 12 conferences. In the case of the AAC, only the better current AAC schools make the cut. These other schools that would normally align with the Big XII or SEC but when you only have 10 teams each, they don’t fit there. It will be more apparent once the full 80 teams and the breakdown of the other conferences are seen. And in this hypothetical scenario, all 8 big conferences would be on equal footing (though there would be always extra hype around Big Ten and SEC). I know it would never happen given conference tv rights money, but in my perfect world, here is what would work best.
GTGFTS
Fourth of July 1977
Marty Perez becomes Nolan’s 10th K of the night to tie the record mentioned.
Final score remains 4-2 with Ryan pitching an 11 K CG.
Ryan would take sole possession of the record on 16 July vs Seattle, and end his career with 215 10+ K games.
GTGFTS
Sixth of September 1969
Marty Perez becomes Nolan’s 69th K of the night to tie the record mentioned.
Final score remains 6-9 with Ryan pitching an 69 K CG.
Ryan would take sole possession of the record on the 6th hour of the ninth day in July vs Seattle, and end his career with 215 69 K games.
A bunch of 69 jokes. Nice?
It got better as I scrolled, but there was still a lot of white over white for the away uniforms. This could be completely accurate as I know next to nothing about college football, but it felt like a bit much either way.
Agree with you, Charlie, exactly my point. Why so many white pants in away uniforms when a contrast color is not clashing with home teams from the same conference?And Georgia Tech at home in gold? No, in navy please, with gold accents.
GTGFTU: 23 Dec 2001, Week 15, Seattle Seahawks 24 – 27 New York Giants
(only game between the ny-helmet giants and the classic seahawks)
Near the end of an era, as the Seahawks would switch to their desaturated “Seahawks Blue” and navy look the next season.
All in all, I liked the concepts. I have never been a fan of the team name on the chest but this seemed to work as they weren’t distracting and didn’t take away from the uniform. The only dislikes are Georgia Tech would look better with a blue jersey and I didn’t care for the colored sleeve on FSU’s white jersey. I really like the simplicity of the uniform rather than so many “story telling” elements used in the current uniform that often looks cluttered.
As for the re-alignment, it was interesting and good for a water cooler conversation.
I like your basic ideas for the realignment. But of course, unless they all share the same amount of money and get the same amount (or more) that they get now, there’s no way they are moving.
As far as Uni’s go, the ideas are OK but I don’t mind teams having different ones. Maybe not different every single game but I like multiple helmet colors and other combos occasionally.
I like the idea of clear simplicity in uniforms but a different uniform every now and then is not that harmful and gives us stuff to rave or rant about. No, I am not looking at you, Oregon Ducks! You take this liberty too far!
Well done, Greg! What a fun project, and I definitely have the impression that your sense of CFB uniform style is pretty much the same as mine. Anxious to see future editions!
Only question I have for the CFB concept is why some teams were all white top/bottom while others had mix matched colors top/bottom?
Of course that kind of realignment will never happen because everyone wants to be in the prestige conferences. Those conference names carry TV contract value and a lot of pride.
But you could spread those names around by having only four conferences, each with two divisions of ten teams each. The new problems would be:
The SEC and Big 10 don’t want to dilute their product adding lesser schools.
The Big 12 can’t add the West Coast schools without leaving a gap elsewhere. But if the West Coast schools join the Big 10 instead, then you get into the dilution issue.
The ACC could be a merger of the ACC and AAC schools presented in this article, but I’d kick out three of the Texas schools so as to add Army, Navy and Notre Dame.
The other conferences’ members would have to be sufficiently incentivized to vote to dissolve them.
The TV networks might swallow lesser schools as long as their contracts are rewritten so that they get the lesser schools in bigger TV markets.
Yeah, realistically it never happens because of money. But in my fantasy situation, greed is ditched for the good of the game, since there is plenty of money to share anyway.
I think 4 big conferences with two 10 team divisions works too, with the divisions playing in conference championship games to determine bye weeks for the top 4 teams?
Might this be the first UW concept to double as a realignment concept? My one nitpick about the latter is that only having two open dates on your schedule would really reduce your flexibility in scheduling games you want. If you have an out-of-conference rival you want to play annually, then you’re down to just one slot to play around with. I would scrap the forces matchups between, say, the 6th place ACC team and 6th place SEC team.
Yeah, I get that, my thought was how to preserve the bowl games in season, which would sort of force the cross conference matchups across the board. But I’d also be fine with dropping the bowl games all together at this point. Either way, definitely agree it is a limited scheduling flexibility for out of conference rivals.
No college football concept for Maryland? Indulge in the flag pattern
The uniform designs are fine, pretty basic; hopefully the upcoming parts are more interesting than these.
A question on the realignment: So the bowls now move to the beginning of the season? Where are the quarter and semifinal playoff games played?
I’d like to see the Saints “steal” your design for Missouri.