A Whole New CFB World: Simulating Two Mega Conferences
Two super conferences. 1,000 simulations each. Let the games begin!
The College Football world as we know it continues to change with every passing day. For those of you that may not have seen the news or were on vacation, it was announced that UCLA and USC would join the Big Ten.
After the previous announcement of Oklahoma and Texas joining the SEC, we assumed more teams would eventually jump allegiances. The SEC and Big Ten have emerged as the frontrunners of a new era of college football, with the rest of the conferences scrambling to keep their footing. With rumors of the Big 12 looking to absorb some of the Pac-12 into their ranks, along with rumors of FSU/Clemson/Miami looking at a possible ACC exodus, we are just getting started with the conference carousel.
Amidst all of this chaos, this particular tweet from Nicole Auerbach (The Athletic) peaked my interest:
This got me thinking. What would two megaconferences look like? How would that look on the football field? Let’s get to work!
Methodology
Megaconferences with well over 20+ teams will have an interesting time deciding how to schedule and determine their conference champion. In reality it will be nearly impossible to get programs to agree to more than the traditional 12 game regular season, so for this article we will suspend reality. This allows us to expand the regular season and adopt a schedule and format that we are all familiar with and can handle a larger amount of teams: the NFL format!
17 regular season games. 32 teams split up into two conferences. In each conferences, you have four divisions with four teams each. This format gives us enough games to work with and a playoff system determined by play on the field. Each megaconference (SEC, Big Ten) will act as its own separate NFL type league.
There are 65 Power 5 Football Teams plus 4 additional teams joining the power 5 (Cincinnati, BYU, UCF, Houston to the Big 12). This gets us to the magical number of 69 (Nice). You can’t exactly split a program in half, so get to two leagues of 32, five teams will be getting the pinkslip. The teams that won’t be joining us are as follows: Kansas, Duke, Vanderbilt, Oregon State, Rutgers. They were chosen because they are teams that have been largely uncompetitive in the Power 5 (would have been nice to have some Rutgers memes, but alas).
Once our megaconferences are created, we will need a way to give them power ratings in order to simulate a season. The ELO system, a rating system that is familiar to the newsletter, is perfect for our simulations. We need to pick an initial ELO rating that will update based on whether the team won or lost, and by their margin of victory or defeat. I decided to use a teams average ELO rating from the 2010-2021 seasons as their initial ELO rating for this simulation. This was chosen as a way to gauge a teams overall performance over a wide span of time, rather than their end of 2021 season ELO rating, which would be more of an indicator of their most recent achievements.
Once we have our ELO ratings, its time to simulate! Thanks to the incredible work by Lee Sharpe and Sebastian Carl at nflseedR, we just have to plug in our ELO model and ratings, and we can easily simulate the regular season and postseason 1000 times. Each game will be simulated, and a teams ELO rating will update based on the result of the game. It should be noted I tweaked the adjustment of ELO ratings to help account for the wider range of team strengths and bigger point margins. Without further ado, let’s simulate!
Megaconference 1: The SEC
The SEC megaconference contains teams from the SEC, ACC and Big 12. Every team is contained into the southern part of the United States, which would help build up the regional rivalries around the megaconference. Based on current TV rights deals, and the reality that media conglomerates are leading the charge on this whole consolidation of college football, this is the Disney conference.
The teams were divided into divisions based on an interest of keeping rivalries as close as possible. Im not sure the real world could handle two Iron Bowls or two Red River Showdowns every year, but for our world thats exactly what we get. After 1000 simulations, most teams hover around 7-10 average wins. Every team won the title at least once, and aside from Alabama we have a good deal of parity in each division.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Alabama is a frequent visitor of the title game. They won the ESPN conference 33% of the time, and won the entire league 20% of the time. The most common opponent for the Crimson Tide was Oklahoma, Clemson (a rematch of the 2015,2016 and 2018 National championships) and Georgia (rematch of the 2017 and 2021 national championships). The most common newcomer is TCU, who fought their way out of a tough division of Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas A&M.
Even in this format, Alabama dominates. So what does it look like outside of the Tide in the ESPN conference? Florida and LSU appear on the bottom of the table, but what about the other teams? We can restrict Alabama to only appear once on the table to get more notable matchups:
Restricting Alabama’s appearances on this table allows us to see the ABC divisions rotating big 3 of Clemson, Oklahoma and Georgia appearing in the title game. There a lot of potential interesting storylines here: the rivalries of UGA/LSU and UGA/Auburn taking center stage for all the marbles, Dabo Swinney vs. Lane Kiffin (what a media day that would be), Miami looking for revenge on Clemson and to prove once and for all that the U is back.
We have seen the most common matchups, but what about those 1% matchups? The true chaos that lies within a thousand simulations. The seasons of pure insanity.
That is what im talking about. NC State - South Carolina for the honor of becoming the champion of Disney. Mike Leach in the brightest of spotlights, what could possibly go wrong? These are the simulations that happened exactly one time, and include teams that aren’t exactly the first teams you’d think of when you think of title contenders. While highly unlikely, you can never say never.
Before moving to the Big Ten, there is one aspect of megaconferences that would be interesting to play out in reality: the concept of promotion and relegation. This system plays out in soccer leagues across the world, where the bottom teams are removed from the top league and replaced with the best performing teams from the lower league. We already had to say goodbye to five Power 5 teams before simulations, and that didn’t even include the entire group of 5. If relegation was part of this megaconference system, we can look at the simulations and see which teams finished in the bottom five and would have been relegated out of the megaconference.
Almost half of the time Virginia is relegated to whatever lower league forms once the megaconferences are established. Following the Cavaliers are Wake Forest, Kentucky, and the lovable Tennessee. I think I can speak for all of us when I say it would be a sight to see on social media if the Tennessee Volunteers were relegated out of the SEC.
Megaconference 2: The B1G
The other megaconference, the Big Ten, is spread more throughout the country. The majority of the conference is housed in the midwest, with sprinkles of the west coast by the absorbed Pac-12 teams and the northeast by the ACC teams. Ohio State leads the way in terms of average ELO, but name brand teams such as Notre Dame, Oregon and USC would certainly find themselves challenging the Buckeyes in future installments of this league. For now, they trail Ohio State based on their respective previous bodies of work.
It was harder to split teams based upon rivalries/regional proximities, so some of these teams may have to stock up on some travel miles.
There was a little less parity when it came to this megaconference, and unfortunately the Syracuse Orangemen were the only team that did not win the title in any simulations. While there wasn’t as much parity, Ohio State wasn’t as dominant as Alabama was in their respective megaconferences, winning the title only 17% of the time as opposed to Bama’s 20%.
A national title between two blue bloods in Ohio State vs. Notre Dame, A blue blood vs. a relatively new blood in Oregon, and Wisconsin finally breaks through and gets to a title game. Similar to the SEC and Alabama, Ohio State dominates its respective conference (the Fox Sports conference).
While Syracuse did not win a championship, they did end up making one in one of the simulations, only to fall to Cameron Rising and the Utah Utes. Other once in a simulation matchups include Arizona and Northwestern, the Purdue Spoilermakers against Washington, and Washington State taking on the pride of Indiana. I have to admit, the Homefield Apparel products that would come from an Indiana football championship would be legendary.
Finally, we get to some relegation time. Colorado is the runaway winner (or loser) of the relegation sweepstakes, followed by Purdue and Indiana. While it happened less than 10% of the time, to be in a world where Notre Dame gets relegated to a lower tiered league… twitter would be on fire for weeks.
Conclusion
Whether you like it or not, college football is changing before our very eyes. Conference are changing by the day, and eventually may well morph into two megaconferences with everyone else left to make something for themselves. This was an attempt to simulate two megaconferences in some sort of structured environment. While we saw some familiar faces at the top, we also got to see some newcomers rise to the top of the league. For now, we wait by our phones for more conference shattering news as we inch closer to some real football being played in 2022.