Bringing Promotion and Relegation To College Football
Starting in 1968
Bringing Promotion and Relegation To College Football
I set up a promotion and relegation system to play through college football history.
This was prompted by discovering that the Action PC Football homebrew community has created college seasons for consecutive years from 1968 through 1987:
While it’s not a perfect stretch of time, it gives us the chance to do at least some experimentation with a theoretical promotion and relegation world.
The 1968 season also works quite well for this project. Both the AP and UPI polls at the end of 1967 agreed on which teams were the top 8 teams in the country:
That made the Championship division easy to make:
I then arranged the rest of the teams based on UPI rankings (the AP only listed 10 teams in 1967), as well as a collection of teams with winning records. This gave me 3 tiers in the end:
I actually wanted to include some fun and random teams, like the Ivy League teams — but, unfortunately, the 1968 homebrew season doesn’t include them.
I created a league structure that was somewhat wide open. I decided to include modern NFL overtime rules to try to prevent tie games:
I also made the somewhat controversial decision to launch the game in alternate reality mode:
Each team was scheduled to play 14 games total — home and away against every team in their respective league. Since they were playing more games in the project than in real life, I figured that the usage rules that were part of the alternate reality setting were appropriate.
In the end, the results were pretty interesting.
Tier Three
We’ll start with the third tier.
Utah State came close to winning the Layden League. They won 11 games in a row before faltering.
Nebraska, meanwhile, are in danger of being relegated. Teams who finish at the bottom of the third rung will have a single game against a team that could move into the league at the beginning of the next season. We’ll cover that at the beginning of next season.
In the end, it was Clemson who moved on to the promotion playoff game.
Dayton surprised me by easily winning the Crowley League. That’s pretty good for an independent team that was 5-5 in real life against middling competition. I guess that’s what “alternate reality” does.
West Virginia won the Miller League after going undefeated.
And, in the Stuhldreher League, Michigan had an easy time.
Now, only 2 teams from the third tier will move up to the second tear. I randomly arranged the winners from the 4 third tier leagues in single playoff games to see who will progress.
Clemson spoiled West Virginia’s undefeated season:
And Michigan dominated Dayton:
Tier Two
Georgia was dominant in the American League:
Meanwhile, the National League came down to the final game of the season between Arizona State and Florida State:
Arizona State and Georgia then played an absolutely awesome promotion playoff:
And so Arizona State will go up to the Championship next season.
Speaking of which…
Tier One
Notre Dame dominated from start to finish.
It was actually a pretty anticlimactic season. Notre Dame had everything clinched before Week 12.
Tennessee will be demoted and Arizona State will be promoted for 1969.
Here are the leader boards:
“Cress” is actually Bernie Kress of Dayton, who had an extremely good season for whatever reason.
And there you have it.
So what do you think?