A simple principle of fairness
On Saturday mornings, I often found myself watching English Premier League football while folding laundry. At first, I was enjoying the games. But as I became more familiar with how promotion and relegation worked, I became fascinated by the basic fairness of the idea.
A club’s performance determined where it belonged. Teams that succeeded could rise. Teams that struggled could fall. A club was not permanently limited by its history, reputation, geography, financial status, or the league in which it happened to begin. There was always something at stake, and there was always a path forward.
I could not stop thinking about how well that basic principle could apply to American college football.
What if position had to be earned?
College football has hundreds of programs, enormous fan loyalty, and teams competing at many different levels. Yet most of those programs have no realistic pathway to the top. Their place in the sport is often determined by conference affiliation, television value, institutional influence, geography, and decisions made far away from the football field.
That does not mean the teams at the top have not earned their success. Many of them have built outstanding programs over generations. But it does mean that success on the field is not the only factor deciding which programs receive the greatest opportunities. For many schools, even an exceptional season does not create a clear path toward competing at the highest level.
I began asking a simple question: What might college football look like if performance, rather than conference membership, determined a program’s position?
From there, the idea continued to grow.
More reasons for every game to matter
I imagined a system in which every team had something meaningful to pursue. Some teams would compete for a national championship. Others would fight for promotion, try to avoid relegation, or work to rebuild and rise again. Strong teams would earn advancement. Teams that consistently struggled would face real competitive consequences rather than remaining protected by conference status or tradition.
I also wanted to see more games between evenly matched opponents. College football includes too many predictable mismatches and so-called buy games in which the outcome is often expected before the teams take the field. Those games may serve financial or scheduling purposes, but they do not always produce the kind of competition that makes sports compelling.
In a merit-based structure, teams would regularly play opponents closer to their own competitive level. More games would be competitive. More standings would remain unsettled late in the season. A November game between two teams outside the national rankings could still matter greatly because promotion, relegation, or survival in a league might be at stake.
Opportunity throughout one connected structure
Most of all, I wanted smaller and overlooked programs to have a visible and understandable path toward the highest level. That path would not be easy, and it should not be. A program might need several strong seasons to climb through the system. But the opportunity would exist. Every school would belong to one connected structure, and every position within that structure could be earned.
The Premier League was the inspiration for this project, but my proposal is not an attempt to copy English football exactly. College football has its own traditions, scale, schools, geography, and culture. Any workable system must account for those differences. My goal is to adapt the central principle of promotion and relegation to the realities of American college football.
A proposal that invites difficult questions
I understand that this is an ambitious proposal. It raises difficult questions involving traditional rivalries, travel, finances, television contracts, and existing conferences. I do not pretend that every problem has a simple answer. Some compromises would be necessary, and some parts of the idea would need further study.
The purpose of this project is not to claim that I have solved every problem in college football. It is to demonstrate that a more open, competitive, and merit-based structure is possible, and that it deserves serious discussion.
Encouraging people to imagine another possibility
I do not expect one website or one proposal to transform college football by itself. I hope it encourages fans to question the assumption that the current structure is the only possible structure. I hope readers will imagine a system in which every team begins the season with meaningful stakes and every program can rise as far as its performance will carry it.
In sports, opportunity should not be permanently inherited or denied. It should be earned on the field.