NCAA vs FA scheduling

Just wrote this letter to King Kaufman, sports writer for Salon.com.

King,
Do you know anything about the way the soccer leagues in the UK are set up? Perhaps there are some lessons that the NCAA could take to heart.

Essentially, teams are divided up into leagues based on their results from the previous year. The best 20 teams are in the Premiership (for example, Manchester United, the only team that most people outside of Europe know of), followed by the 24 teams in the Championship league, followed by League One and League Two. All in all, that is 92 teams.

At the end of the season, the top three teams from a lower division are promoted to the next division and the lowest three teams are relegated to the division below. The incentive, beyond the desire to win, is the extra cash and notoriety that comes from being in a higher division. Advertising fees and broadcasting rights are more lucrative and ticket prices go up as well. The team at the top of the Premiership wins the coveted trophy.

It solves, to a degree, your beef with the current college system whereby the first games of the season are not competitive enough. It also allows the fans of a mediocre team to watch a game where they stand a "snowball's chance" of winning. Two mediocre teams can combine to provide watchable soccer, or at least soccer where the outcome is in doubt (and that is what makes any sporting event interesting). As a fan of Purdue football, watching the Boilermakers outscore their opponents 110-7 in their first two games was very uninteresting.

The explosion in the number of bowl games in the past decade just goes to show that fans, coaches and university presidents can only be satiated by a meaningless bowl victory, such as the Continental Tire Bowl. The UK system allows ten teams to say they accomplished something meaningful (three teams promoted from three leagues and one Premiership victor), and it also allows for a race at both ends of the league: teams at the top scramble for a promotion, teams at the bottom scramble to avoid relegation.

Sure, it would require reworking a conference system that has been in place for decades and decades and it would require ending the trivial rivalries (Purdue vs Ball State just because they are in the same state?) that make alumni swoon, but it just might provide for more consistently entertaining football.