Good morning, Uni Watchers! And a Happy Tuesday and Christmas Eve to one and all.
Last week, I ran the first of four sets of concepts from long-time reader Greg Seher, who has done eighty (!) designs for the eighty college football teams in his concepts, which also includes some conference realignment. When he contacted me, 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.”
The first set of concepts were for the American Athletic Conference (AAC) and Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC). Today’s Part II will cover the B1G and Big XII.
So without further ado, here’s Greg with Part II of his NCAA Football Concepts.
by Greg Seher
NCAA D-1A Football
I’m trying to consolidate NCAA top-tier football here by 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.
Big Ten Conference
Classic Big Ten lineup.
Illinois
Big XII Conference
Could probably use a new name, but includes most of the original conference members, maintaining rivalries.
Baylor
Readers? What say you?
GTGFTU: 1971 divisional playoff, Dec 25. Dolphins 27, KC 24. Y’all know the rest.
GTGFTS: I want to go with April 18, 1962, Braves 6, Giants 4. Warren Spahn gets the win. But something doesn’t sit right. Stan Landes umpired 2nd base that day. His number was 12. The scoreboard says #11. But I don’t see any other Braves v. SFG in Milwaukee in April.
@Greg: Nice work! However, replace the old “N” on Nebraska’s helmets with the modern “block N” (same one that’s at midfield) and that would be sharp!
Yes, Dec 25, 1971 Christmas day.
link
NFL Films did a great movie on the game- the longest in NFL history. Watched this game with my father, Ron Waller and his second wife Deloris. They are all gone now, I don’t remember any particular Christmas from my childhood, but maybe because of this game I remember this one very well.
Thanks for sharing these, Greg! I appreciate your classic sensibilities when it comes to uniform design – and conference alignment!
Leo’s world? Did I miss something?
No. Originally I was going to run another Leo’s World today, but that will run Thursday instead. I simply forgot to remove the comment in my outro (my bad). Bottom section now corrected.
Thanks Phil. Always look forward to a Leo’s World segment!
Thanks for that, Patrick, it’s nice to be appreciated!
Hope you have a Merry Christmas!
Great concepts. I like the Texas AM shoulder stripes. I wish they’d kept those when they lost the beveled numbers.
@Greg – is there some rule you have for which teams get white pants vs colored pants? (In my subjective opinion, Baylor’s should be gold.)
I like the realignment concept. Of course some teams get screwed (Arkansas, Missouri, TCU in the previous edition), but it’s not like that isn’t already happening. I see a classic Big East brewing with Penn St, Virginia Tech, Syracuse added in there.
Early season bowls is interesting. Biggest challenge is maintaining non conference yearly rivalries — although this realignment makes a lot of the best ones conference games again — while also keeping the pay-to-play FCS/lower tier games, which are crucial for the sport top down.
How can I send a contribution to GTGFTU? Thanks.
Shoot me a e-mail with photo (and answer): phil.hecken@gmail
I don’t think these NCAA uniform concepts are very interesting or creative.