“Hey, Big 12! We’re really good!” — The message BYU wants to send in its bowl game, even though the Big 12 won’t expand next year or the year after that. BYU is trying to plant seeds that will sprout several years down the line.

College Football: With The ACC Recognizing BYU As A Power 5 Opponent, New Possibilities Emerge

If you were to cite one pervasive flaw in college football — not a specific policy such as pass interference not being reviewable, or an isolated failing such as the unwillingness to schedule New Year’s Six games on Saturday, Jan. 2, 2016 — you could come up with several legitimate and compelling answers.

You could point to non-conference scheduling. You could cite the continued presence of polls. You could refer to concussion protocols. You could bring up the conference tie-ins in bowls. All those answers are valid. Yet, if you wanted to identify a foremost weakness in the sport — something which shows up again and again in different ways — you would not go wrong if you said, “Imbalance.”

There really is an imbalanced and uneven way in which the sport is arranged, or in which it chooses to arrange so many elements of competition.

Consider: Some conferences have championship games, while others — most prominently, the Big 12 — do not. 

Some conferences have eight-game schedules, others nine. 

Runs and passes — in terms of what constitutes legal possession of each — are treated in imbalanced ways.

Offensive face mask penalties aren’t called nearly as often as defensive face mask penalties.

Conferences with rotating divisional schedules invite imbalance, as can be seen in the fact that Duke (ACC Coastal) and Clemson (ACC Atlantic) have not played the past few seasons. Divisions themselves are manifestations of imbalance: See the SEC West versus the SEC East this past season. 

The Rose Bowl and especially the Sugar Bowl are treated differently when compared to the other four New Year’s Six games.

Field goals that fly above the top of the upright cannot be reviewed on replay. Only field goals that fail to fly higher than the top of the upright can be reviewed.

Inconsistency and imbalance are built into so much of what you see and hear and experience in college football.

Thursday, the sport gained a fresh opportunity to deal with one of its more urgent imbalances: the way in which Brigham Young football is treated, something which could spill over into another story broken by Brett McMurphy of ESPN.

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First, the BYU story. The Atlantic Coast Conference changed its mind and said that BYU would count as a Power 5 conference opponent on future schedules. The news was received with open arms in Utah, and rightly so — this is rightly seen as a huge boost to the Cougars in terms of their ability to schedule well, and also in terms of the way in which they’re recognized on a national level.

The move by the ACC does raise a basic contradiction, of course: Though BYU is going to be recognized as a Power 5 program over here, the rest of college football (structurally speaking) still regards the Cougars as a Group of Five team over there. BYU has been thrown into a basket with the five lower-tier conferences. That designation has not yet been stripped from the Cougars.

It only makes sense to differentiate BYU from the Group of Five and give the Cougars the Power 5 status they need. If BYU isn’t given Power 5 recognition on a more expansive level, the school should at least be able to carve out provisions for easier and more immediate New Year’s Six access within the Group of Five, which currently selects the highest-ranked conference champion for a prestigious bowl. BYU, being independent, can’t make itself a conference champion.

What is the case BYU has for wanting to receive different — and elevated — status in college football? Consider what a former fellow independent will do later this year.

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This was a newsmaker story on Thursday, from Brett McMurphy of ESPN:

What’s germane to this discussion of BYU is that Navy, by joining a conference (The American), now has direct access to the Group of Five New Year’s Six bowl slot. Navy, in other words, has more direct access to the NY6 than BYU does. Joining a conference is what did it.

Yet, BYU — following this Power 5 story and the ACC’s outreach to the school — is now in a strong position to land bigger, better, high-profile opponents. The Cougars are likely to schedule more Power 5 teams as a result of this story. They won’t abandon scheduling Group of Five teams, but the ACC’s announcement certainly pushes BYU closer to the Power 5 camp as a reflection of schedule composition. College football could do nothing — it has historically been great at displaying inertia when leadership was needed in the room — but the sport certainly ought to resolve the inconsistencies and imbalances which currently govern BYU relative to Notre Dame and (on the other hand) Army. With Navy leaving the independents and joining a conference, the Midshipmen have taken a simple step which gives them a much better chance of being able to qualify for a NY6 bowl. BYU, though, doesn’t want to divorce itself from the kind of schedule it can create each year (high-profile, lucrative, attractive to recruits) as an independent.

Can reasonable people carve out a compromise?

If college football wants to address one of many basic imbalances, it should… and will.

About Matt Zemek

Editor, @TrojansWire | CFB writer since 2001 |

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