BYU Football: Exploring different Big 12 pod options
By Adam Gibby
It appears that most, if not all FBS conferences will get rid of divisions.
As Power Five conferences continue to expand, it is becoming clear that divisions will no longer work. One example of this is in the SEC. As it currently is arranged, a team from the West such as Arkansas will only play a team from the East once every four years which means that the Hogs will only play the Gators in Fayetteville once every eight years. With the addition of Texas and Oklahoma, that number would become once every sixteen years. That is hardly a conference.
One has to imagine that in the coming years every conference will be in a spot where it is too large to function well under divisions. One easy proposal is to have a round robin schedule, but that won’t work because rivalry games always need to be played. But then some schools have two rivals (Michigan has MSU and Ohio State).
This issue leads to the need to have pods, or groups of four teams that play each other on a yearly basis and then three of the four teams the other years. This leads to every team playing in every stadium every three years, much better than every sixteen.
If the Big 12 were to expand to 16 teams, then the same would still hold with the only change being playing two instead of three teams in every pod, or once in every stadium every four years.
With all of that, here are the Lawless Republic proposed pods and a small explanation of why: