If you've missed it, Jason Kirk and the college football friends over at SBNation.com have deemed this week Relegation Week. With all the conference expansion and realignment, it was decided that relegation should be attempted, and what followed was a pretty amazing exercise. This wasn't simply throwing teams around and taking a dartboard approach to relegation: They explained why is should happen, how it would happen, arranged the conferences into tier and, finally, got to relegatin'.
Let's catch up before we get to the good stuff.
- Spencer Hall on why college football needs to embrace cannibalism (it's good, as always).
- An interview with a relegation expert (our soccer friend Kevin McCauley) to explain this all.
- The real legwork begins: All the conferences are arranged and tiered -- all the way down to the NAIA.
So that was all the prep work done. It was all building up to Thursday's adventure, in which Bill Connelly simmed everything since 2005 and started moving teams up and down. The concept is simple: Last-place finisher in a tier goes does; first-place finisher in the tier below moves up.
You knew Washington State was going down.
On the plus side, the Cougars were responsible for the Washington Huskies being sent to the MWC in the first year of the sim. The Apple Cup became a de facto playoff game for the relegation spot and down went the Huskies.
The bad news? Renewing the rivalry with Idaho in 2013 was probably pointless. After two incredibly bad years in 2008 and 2009, the Cougars fell from the Pac-10 to the MWC, then immediately dropped to the WAC. We missed you, Idaho.
At the end of it all, Washington State is still in the WAC this year -- lawd, Mike Leach is going to put up eleventy billion points on those poor souls -- and Washington is still in the MWC. The only Washington school that ended up with a good deal was Eastern Washington (now in the WAC and at one point in the MWC while the Cougars were in the tier below).
So, relegation ... cool idea or "no thanks"? And if you have any questions leave them on Bill's realignment piece above.