Secession football

          I recently noted with amazement that citizens in every state have started petitions urging their state’s secession from the Union following the re-election of President Obama.

          We’ve seen this before. The South tried to leave the Union about 150 years ago and it didn’t work out too well. These lame-brained petitions will get no further than Fox News, but our Constitution guarantees the right to make stupid comments and even worse decisions.

          Please know that I understand the frustration these petitioners are expressing. Really, I do. I mean, heck, I emigrated from California to Ohio this year.

          Politics have their place in our lives, but the intention here is to dig into the really important question: How would the loss of the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas impact the college football landscape?

          Can’t you see it? The National Collegiate Athletic Association would lose a lot of important members. Those former NCAA members would form the Whatever Athletic Association and the WAA would award its own national championships in the various sports.

            We wouldn’t need a college football playoff system. The loss of the Southeastern Conference would leave the NCAA with two really strong football conferences, the Big Ten (which has a dozen members) and the Pacific 12 (which used to be the Pac 8 before it was the Pac 10). The Rose Bowl could return to tradition, matching the champion of the Midwest against the champion of the West, and would crown the national champion.

          The NCAA would finally have a title game without a Southeastern Conference school in it.

          The Big East, Big West and all those other conferences would continue to whine about better recognition, as they do now, and we’d have plenty of controversy.

          Notre Dame, as an independent, would probably insist on playing a schedule that would include schools from the seceded states. But Notre Dame would whine and insist that it none-the-less be included in the consideration for the Rose Bowl every three years. No change there.

          The Atlantic Coast Conference would take a hit, losing members. But the ACC is so football weak that few fans would even notice. Speaking of the ACC, can you imagine ACC basketball without Duke and North Carolina? There is a secession petition in the state of North Carolina, too.

          And what would the fictional WAA’s national football championship look like? Very little change from the recent NCAA title games, really. Two teams from the SEC, which would be better than anyone the NCAA could find, would play for the national title and the game would alternate every year between the Orange Bowl and the Sugar Bowl.

          Most schools from the NCAA would refuse to schedule teams from the WAA, citing the cost of international travel and the excessive time away from class these games would mean to the student athletes.

San Diego State could still be a member of the Big East, you understand, but that is a fully different matter.

No, the real reason the NCAA schools would refuse to venture south would be the same reason northern schools refused to play southern schools fifty years ago and still don’t like to do it today: They wouldn’t want to get beat.

Last year, I checked the roster of the national football champion Alabama Crimson Tide and discovered the majority of players on the team were natives of the South. So student/athlete recruiting would stay about the same for the WAA schools. That means it would be about the same for the NCAA schools as well.

In the final analysis, how would college football change with a new round of secession? Not much really. But it is funny to note that the first three letters in the word secession are SEC.

 

Thanks for reading.