The college football superconference is coming. In fact, it’s closer than you think.

Step one? The loss of regional hegemony. Conferences like the Big 12 and the Big East looked outside their regional footprint for new teams

Step two? The new playoff system, coming to college football in 2014. This is the much rumored format with the top four teams playing in national semifinals, with winners playing in the national championship game. If it’s supposed to make things fairer, it will in terms of competition. But in terms of money and prestige, the stripping of the automatic qualifying status will leave an uneven economic playing field.

Step three? The consolidation of power. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have always had it, thanks to their unyielding allegiance to the Rose Bowl, and they’ve used that chip to influence how the BCS distributes its bowl teams. Now the Big 12 and SEC have joined forced to create their own bowl partnership that pretty much guarantees them a Rose Bowl-level contest every year, regardless of the playoff. It assures that the bowl system is still the most powerful cog in college football.

Step four? It has to be the college football superconference, the 16-team behemoth that the Pac-10 nearly became a couple of years ago. Why? If there’s no automatic qualifying status in the BCS, then the power will be centralized with the conferences that have the teams with the best chance to win a national title. That’s the Big 12, the Big Ten, the Pac-12 and the SEC, so they’ll be the ones to form the new college football superconferences. The ACC and the Big East were built on basketball, and football, frankly, is an afterthought.

Florida State finally figured that out. That’s why they’re making so much noise about joining the Big 12.

So how does this all go down? Well, theoretically there are 16 slots available to create four 16-team superconferences using the Big 12, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC. Let’s assume that all four conferences get the same idea at the same time – go to 16 teams. Let’s also assume they don’t poach each other. Here’s how I think it goes:

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What in the world is Florida State up to? Perhaps no program has ever put itself out there on the realignment limb so boldly. And how did the Big 12 get dragged into this?

Those are all practical questions.

Over the weekend, the good news of the ACC’s new TV contract with ESPN turned ugly. Florida State wasn’t happy, or at least one guy at FSU wasn’t happy – Andy Haggard, the president of the FSU board of trustees, as reported by Warpaint.com. Why? Well, Haggard said that the league gave away its third-tier TV rights for football, but not basketball. Turns out Haggard’s logic was dead wrong (ESPN received all tiered rights to ACC programming), but FSU has never really been comfortable with the notion that the ACC thinks basketball first.

If I were Haggard, I’d be unhappy with the overall price tag, which is less than both the Big Ten and Pac-12, and about to be less than the SEC and Big 12, even if the logic of that unhappiness is unjustified. So Haggard threw out there that FSU should explore its options, and mentioned the Big 12 by name. Then FSU’s football coach, Jimbo Fisher, did the same thing. Well, that’s cool except …

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Which BCS playoff format are you leaning toward – a format in which the Top 4 teams, regardless of finish, reach the BCS playoffs, or a format in which the Top 4 conference champions reach the BCS playoffs?

I’m with Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott on this one. I’d rather see a format in which winning a conference title is justly rewarded, especially since four of the six BCS conferences require their conference champion to win a conference title game. My biggest issue with the Alabama-LSU matchup in this year’s BCS National Championship game was the fact that Alabama reached the game without winning its conference title (and after losing to LSU in the regular season). I don’t like the idea of a team that didn’t win its conference title being rewarded with a playoff berth. The only scenario in which I would find it acceptable is if you rewarded each conference champion in FBS with a playoff berth in a larger playoff format. Since we know that isn’t going to happen, let’s restrict access to the ones that rise to the top of their conference.

Where does Notre Dame go from here with Tommy Rees? Which non-BCS conference made out the best in expansion? Find out that and more after the jump.

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Les Miles probably went a bit too far with his recent comments about Gunner Kiel.

So Gunner Kiel, smartly, takes the high road on LSU head coach Les Miles’s recent comments.

You may remember that before Kiel committed and signed with Notre Dame, he was going to sign and enroll early at LSU. Well, Miles didn’t take too kindly to that and during a team rally before spring workouts and took a shot at Kiel: “We needed a quarterback in this class. There was a gentleman in Indiana that thought about coming to the Bayou State. He did not necessarily have the chest and the ability to lead a program.”

Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy was ripping apart a local columnist after that writer criticized an OSU player (that’s the famous, “I’m A MAN! I’m 40!” speech), with Gundy basically telling the columnist to back off? Shouldn’t coaches be held to the same standard when it comes to talking about these kids? Miles obviously forgot that as he pandered to the LSU faithful, who cheered loudly after Miles said this.

Kiel, fortunately, took the higher road when asked about Miles’ remarks, saying he would just use it as fuel to become a better player. Good for him, because it’s just plain sad when an 18-year-old kid can outclass a grown man like Miles, who should really know better. You could put some of this on Kiel, but when the system is designed to allow kids to change their minds about their future on a daily basis, well, it’s hard to blame the kid for exercising that right.

I’ll say this – I think Kiel made the right call. Brian Kelly’s offense at Notre Dame is better suited for his skill set. And it’s not like LSU is hurting with Zach Metterberger. It just sounds like sour grapes on Miles’ part.

Other things I’m pondering as I try to determine why I was dumb enough to take Missouri in my NCAA bracket …

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It took nearly two months to finish off the college football hiring season, which leads me directly to the PigskinU.com 2012 FBS head coach hiring rankings.

I took the time after the final hiring of the offseason to rank all of the new head coaching hirings in FBS, from No. 27 to No. 1 (yes, there were 27 job changes after the 2011 season, which eclipses the totals in both 2011 and 2010. It’s been an insane offseason, to say the least).

First, let’s be clear – this is my opinion, and I base it on a number of factors, including the experience and reputation of the coach, the current state of the program, the perceived ability for the program to be competitive early and how the coach’s hire relates to the overall reputation of the program. In other words, did the school get it right?

Second, this is not a best to worst list of coaching hires. I would not say that hires that I have ranked toward the bottom of these rankings means they’re bad coaches. I feel like you have to show you’re a good coach to be a head coach somewhere. Rather, the coaches ranked near the bottom of this survey all have something working against them, such as taking over a bad program, their own lack of experience, issues they have no control of off the field, etc…

And, finally, this is not scientific. Much of it is how I feel about the hire in my gut. I don’t have a formula for determining if a head coach is the right head coach for that school, and neither does anyone else. At the end of the day, it comes down to your gut. And 27 athletic directors went with their guts this winter.

But some did better than others. We’ll continue with the next tier, Nos. 16-20.

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Scout.com ranked the conference’s overall recruiting haul at No. 8 overall. That puts the conference behind all six BCS leagues, along with the Independents (helped significantly by Notre Dame’s Top 25 class). But, Conference USA was ranked well ahead of the rest of the non-BCS leagues.

But if this were entering the 2013 season, that ranking would certainly take a hit. Houston and SMU – two of the schools bolting for the Big East that season – were ranked 1-2 this year.

Right now there are preliminary talks about Conference USA and the Mountain West conference merging together in some form. There was an agreement of a football-only merger last year, but that was before C-USA and the Mountain West lost members to the Big East expansion. Now there’s re-assessing going on in every way.

The nine remaining members of Conference USA and the 10 members of the Mountain West – including the three that will join the league in 2012 – would comprise an unwieldy football league to be sure, stretching from Hawaii to North Carolina. Is it possible that the league may only be 12 teams and that the potential new league may cut teams in order to be viable? And where would those teams go if that were the case?

There’s absolutely no way of knowing. In fact, the situation has the potential to be more volatile than the Big East’s recent expansion.

But right now, there are winners and losers to assess for 2012 National Signing Day in Conference USA. Find out who won and who lost after the jump.

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As it stands now, the Big East appeared to have a slightly better year than one would expect considering all of the upheaval. If you look at Scout.com’s conference rankings, the Big East was sixth with 2,022 points. But the Big East was within 300 points of the ACC, Big Ten and Big 12. So there wasn’t a great deal of difference between the four leagues.

Right now, I’m not sure the new members would make that much of a difference to the Big East’s overall rankings. Two of their future schools – Houston and Boise State – were ranked at the top of their current conferences, but their overall rankings among FBS schools wouldn’t have helped the Big East this year. That means that, so far, the new schools haven’t seen a bump in joining the league just yet.

What about the holdover teams? Well, the entire conference recruited just three Top 100 players and 5 five-star players among its haul. The only other conference among the Big 6 to recruit fewer than 10 Top 100 players, according to Scout.com, was the Big 12.

The Big East is a hard sell right now for its coaches. Recruits see the changes in the league and wonder if it will still be a BCS league when the new BCS contract is signed later this year. It’s a legitimate concern. No one knows how the BCS will react to dwindling attendance and sagging ratings. Who knows what will happen.

For now, the Big East is still in the BCS. And only one team can be declared the big winner. Find out who after the jump.

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Navy is finally moving to the Big East. Why did it take so long?

Well, Navy has never clamored for a conference before, though other leagues have been interested in the Midshipmen. But now the only service academy that has retained its football independence for the life of its program will finally give it up for the 2015 season. It took so long, according to published reports, because Navy has its own TV contracts and had to do some renegotiating to accommodate the move to the Big East.

And while Navy isn’t Syracuse or Pittsburgh or West Virginia by any means, it does have a national following, something only a couple of the schools in the revamped Big East are able to say. Navy can draw anywhere because of its ties to thousands of former servicemen and its annual Army-Navy game, which I really wish they would move around to other military towns, like San Antonio, so I have a better chance of going.

So what does this all mean to the Big East and to Navy? I’ll analyze that after the jump.

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Note: This series previously ran at RoadTripSports.com, but given the current climate of conference realignment, stoked by the Big 12, I feel this series of articles is as relevant now as it was a year ago. It will run every few days here at PigskinU.com. Check the PigskinU.com archives for Parts 1, 2 and 3.

So in Part One I laid out an overview of building a better college game. In Part 2, we put our commissioner in charge with a mandate – change college football for the better. In Part 3 we re-drew conference lines, though not as radically as I originally intended.

Now we get to the fun part, starting with the regular season schedule. Given the fact that we will now have conference championship games in every conference, plus a 16-team playoff system, the regular season schedule needs to be altered a bit. If you want a true national champion, streamline the schedule.

Depending upon the schedule some teams play right now, some FBS teams play 14 games in a season. I think that’s a little much, although some teams in our playoff scenario are going to play 16 games, at least the ones that reach the title game.

So my schedule proposal is simple. All FBS teams should play an 11-game regular season schedule. Eight of those games will be conference affairs. Teams should play everyone in their division (that’s five games) and the other three games should be against teams in the other division. Therefore, three non-conference games will be played by each team.

All non-conference games should be played before conference begins. Why? To me, non-conference games are tune-ups for the real season, which is conference play. Winning a conference title is every team’s one guaranteed path to the playoffs. That’s what they should be preparing for. Therefore, all non-conference games will be played starting on the final weekend in August. That will allow teams to have a bye on the third week of September to whet everyone’s appetite for conference, which would start the final weekend of September.

Now, there are a couple of different ways teams could schedule non-conference games. They could continue to do it the way they’re doing it now, which is fine. It would allow teams that have non-conference rivalries to continue those games. For instance, would the world be a better place without Notre Dame-USC? Probably not. I’d love to see texas play Arkansas every once in a while. Pitt and Penn State need to have the opportunity to play. So allowing teams to schedule their non-conference games seems fair. If an average teams schedules patsies every year, well, they’ll be exposed in conference action. Each program and their athletic staff probably know best how to prepare their players for conference.

One formula I came up with was the following; Divide the nation into four quadrants of 30 teams each. Rank them in each quadrant by record for the past two years, and tier them into sets of 10. Then let a computer do the scheduling on a home-and-home basis for the next two years. For instance, a team in the top tier of quadrant 1 would play a Tier 1 team in quadrant B, a Tier 2 team in quadrant C and a Tier 3 team in quadrant D.

One advantage I saw in this was getting teams to play games in different parts of the country. When was the last time Syracuse went west of the Mississippi before this year’s trip to USC? Or USC went east of South Bend? It would allow fans to see different teams from different parts of the country. And it would allow smaller teams to at least have one big home game every two years, if they’re lucky enough to get one of the big boys in the selection process.

But I’m not married to this. I just thought it would be interesting.

The conference schedule would run from the start of October to the end of November, probably right around Thanksgiving. Conferences can schedule this however they would like. This doesn’t vary much from most conference schedules in 12-team leagues.

Once the conference title game contestants have been determined, those games would be played in the first weekend of December, as most of the conference title games are now.

Imagine – 10 conference title games over a two- or three-day period, all broadcast nationally over the ESPN family of networks, CBS or ABC. The exposure just boggles the mind, really. It would be a smorgasbord of exceptional college football. Plus, there’s something on the line for everyone – a playoff berth. The winners get in; the losers go recruit (in some cases).

The revenue these schools will lose by giving up one regular season game will more than be made up in the revenue generated by a conference title game, new playoff TV rights and enhanced conference television network packages. And fans get the buildup we deserve toward a weekend in which everything is on the line for the best teams in the country – and not just the ones that are playing.

Next up: Determining our 16-team playoff field.

Note: This series previously ran at RoadTripSports.com, but given the current climate of conference realignment, stoked by the Big 12, I feel this series of articles is as relevant now as it was a year ago. It will run every few days here at PigskinU.com. Check the PigskinU.com archives for Part 1.

So in Part One I laid out an overview of building a better college game. In Part 2, we’re going to need someone to run it. You want a true national champion? Start with a benevolent dictator.

There’s a fundamental issue when it comes to creating a college football playoff system. Power in college football is not centralized properly. Consider this:

The NCAA regulates the college game. Games are played by their rules. Recruiting is done by their rules. Practices are conducted by their rules. But when the regular season ends, they outsource the postseason to the Bowl Championship Series.

What other sports entity outsources its postseason? Unbelievable. Continue Reading…