Good morning, Uni Watchers, and a Happy Thursday to all.
Three weeks ago, I ran the first of four sets of concepts, which was followed by the second set a week later, and last week we were treated to Part III. These all come 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). Part II covered the B1G and Big XII. In Part III Greg took on the “new” Big East and Mountain West Conferences. With the CFP reaching the semi-finals (beginning tonight and continuing Friday), this is the fourth, and final, part of Greg’s redesigns/realignment. Enjoy!
NCAA Football Concepts: Part IV
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 other 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 Pac-12, and the most likely schools that would move up. Conferences like the Big Ten and SEC retain their traditional schools, the 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.
PAC 10 Conference
Rivals along the coast all remain, swapping out the Arizona schools for SD State and Fresno State.
California
Fresno State
Oregon State
Oregon
San Diego State
Southern California
Stanford
UCLA
Washington State
Washington
Southeastern Conference
Traditional 10 SEC rivals.
Alabama
Auburn
Florida
Georgia
Kentucky
Louisiana State
Mississippi State
Mississippi
Tennessee
Vanderbilt
And that concludes Greg’s NCAA Football concepts and realignment. It was definitely a fun (and thought provoking) project. Thanks, Greg!
Readers? What say you?
GTGFTS: October 26, 1958 Eagles at Packers. Green Bay won 38-35; it was the Packers’ only win that season. They hired a new coach for 1959; I think that worked out okay.
Lombardi was offered the Birds head coaching gig prior to the ‘58 season, but didn’t want the job. Oh, what might have been!
Red Smith on the 1958 Packers’ 1-10-1 record: “they overwhelmed one opponent, under-whelmed ten, and whelmed one.”
The out of town scores are obviously “manual,” and sure enough, there’s a guy pictured on either side of the board, ready to change scores!
Get some rest and take care of yourself. While we appreciate the dedication, taking care of yourself is #1. The uni-verse will be ok if you are not able to post.
Indeed. Get well.
You already have two articles posted, and Anthony has the ticker tomorrow. Take a nice long weekend starting now, and get some rest. Hope you feel better soon.
Agree: health is always first. The rest will take care of itself.
GTGFTU: 17 Oct 2021, Week 6. Kansas City Chiefs 31 – 13 Washington Football Team
Re: University of Mississipi’s alternate logo.
What is that, a shark overlaid over a profile of the state???
My initial thought upon seeing the broken Mississippi logo was: a nose?
Its a take of the lame “Land shark” so called mascot after Col. Reb got run out of town.
Woo-hoo, only 7 white-over-whites this time!
I think you’re missing about 8 uniforms for Oregon ;)
Get well soon, Phil.
Get well, Phil!
The UCLA concept has a Philadelphia Bell/Oakland Invaders feel to it that some folks may like…I sure do.
I’d love to see Temple adopt your SDSU template – nicely done!
Stanford should absolutely go with what you suggest…though I’d add a green tree so that it would rank higher on Kary’s 2025 Christmas List (aka-Dressed for the Season).
Get well soon, Phil.
I know Auburn’s helmet/sleeve/pants striping have always been as you show them, but I would tweak the pants to separate the blue and orange stripes to show a thin white line in between to match the others. IMO, that would make those uniforms more or less perfect.
Phil, take care!
Concepts look like the teams I remember from not that many years ago… love the Kentucky sleeve!
Stanford is not “Cardinal” Penn State. Need a stripe on the pants.
Really, Phil, hang in there!
San Diego State has worn mono-black at home since at least the Coryell days of the 60’s, and I believe quite a bit farther back than that. I believe they wore red jerseys for one game in the early 2000s, and it was met with so much outrage, they didn’t try it again. All that to say that white pants are highly unlikely.
Why does Tennessee have a double stripe on the pants considering their “T” logo? Seems like a single, thick line would be more inline with their main logo
Pac10 makes no sense. They broke up because they couldn’t compete for TV revenue, and you replace the Arizona schools with scrubs from the Mountain West. I get that San Diego State has a good TV market, but why not replace Washington State or Oregon State with them. In fact it would have some logic to replace those two NW schools with San Diego State and UNLV. You’d add a large Southern California TV market along one of the top entertainment cities in the world.
San Diego State always looked better when they had a bit of Gold in the colorsway
Please no checkerboard for Kentucky. Fans hate it and we finally got rid of it in the 2023 season. Absolutely do not want to go back. That’s a major downgrade from what we currently wear.
I hope you get better soon, Phil. At least it will be a nice detox. Rest and don’t worry, we’ll be here when you can resume posting.
random uni bit : the pacers have been rolling out the lowest uni# combos possible on the floor this year with #s 0, 00, 1, 2, & 3
random uni bit : the pacers have been rolling out the lowest uni# combos possible on the floor this year with #s 0, 00, 1, 2, & 3
Yes, Phil, to quote Steve Perry and Journey: Be good to yourself when nobody else will.
Our uni-verse won’t stop turning. We all can cast our own judgments on the CFP Final Four; it’s not like we’ll have any surprises, especially with no Oregon.
As a Fresno State alum, our current, solid color unis are so boring. My tweaks would be keeping the “Bulldogs” script on the helmets, putting the dog logo on the shoulders and keeping the “V” to the back of the helmet.
Redesigns are nice but too close in. There was an opportunity to do have fun moving around Kentuckys checkerboard pattern. I would have liked to see checkered stripes on the pants and helmet.
Love the block “M-State” on the Mss. St. helmet. Hated to see them use the sctipt “State” this year.
Lose the tree in the Stanford logo. Block S is sufficient.
Any thought on bringing back yellow helmets with the embedded C in the blue oval for Cal?
Having the team name on the front of every single uniform is not very creative
Phil, take care of yourself first and please start your weekend now with rest.
These are well done but incredibly formulaic. If you gave me a school, I could picture what they’d look like in this concept. I love the basic premise – contrasting pants where possible, minimal monochrome, stripes (UCLA or Northwestern) – but the school name on every jersey and 95% Block Varsity fonts is almost too conforming.
UCLA needs to be in Clarendon Font.