No.
Screw Maryland. And let Euros like jazznut keep the stupid promotion/relegation bullshit on the other side of the pond.
The American way is better.
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I actually agree in a lot of ways. The USA is too big geography-wise to do it cost effectively.
I donāt believe the franchise model we run here in closed systems is the best way (I know college isnāt officially franchise, but it is quasi-franchise)ā¦ I just donāt think promotion/relegation would work in college athletics based on the geographyā¦ because I still think itās a better sports model overall.
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Honest question to you @lodger96 & @DFresh11ā¦ what do you not like about promotion/relegation? Is it just in the college space or promotion/relegation overall? What are the advantages in the franchise model over the club model of Europe? What are the disadvantages?
Mine has always been the American dream of the underdog, where you can go from worst to first in a year. Canāt do that in promotion/relegation.
Worst gets you demoted, then you have to spend the next year getting promoted.
Also, in the college system, relegation or demotion means a huge loss of revenue, which is guaranteed under TV contracts with the conferences. You canāt unwind that overnight, and some of the bottom-dwellers in football have everything to lose in such a scenario.
Rich get richer ā poor get shipped, where, to G5, D-IAA?
And look at the NFLā¦. Washington would have been relegated after last year. But in our awesome system, the franchise drafted well, used FA well, and coached the players up and went to the conference championship game. That wouldnāt have happened in Europe. Itās the underdog story we love. Europe has always been about the aristocrats.
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Financial stability that facilitates long-term investment, compared to situations when the top division makes much more money than the second division. If youāre a borderline Championship-Premier League club, itās really hard to do a big capital project because your funding stream might get chopped in half in a given year.
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Its dumb unless you are in foreign country then its fine cause money involved etc
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I like promotion/relegation as a concept and I think it could work in college much more feasibly than in the existing US pro leagues, but what are your feelings about parity and everyone having a chance to win? That concept does not exist in the top 6? More than 6? European soccer leagues.
The top 6 clubs in the EPL are almost always the same 6. The bottom 3 that get relegated are very often the 3 that just got promoted. And the other 11 are playing for what? Little danger of getting relegated, but absolutely no chance of winning the league (Leichester aside).
Here are my counter argumentsā¦ but I get where you are coming from.
What about the teams that have been working for years to be promoted to the highest level? Those are the underdogs in this systemā¦ think Wolfsburg winning the 08-09 Bundesliga after narrowly avoiding relegation in 06-07 & 07-08ā¦ or 14-15 Leicester City barely surviving relegation in the Premier League to having one of the biggest underdog seasons to win it all in 15-16?
Relegation also gives relevance to late season games of the bottom of the table games. Some of the countries even have playoffs between the division above against the division below to see who stays up (England does not, but other countries like Germany do).
I think this is an awesome part of promotion/relegationā¦ I understand other opinions on this, but it really prevents tanking which I canāt stand about American sports. I hate the headlineā¦ āThe New York Giants just wonā¦ what were they thinking? They just lost the #1 pick in the draft!ā
This is worked out in what are called parachute payments. Teams that get relegated still get revenue sharing numbers for 3-years from the level above in order to either get re-promoted or normalize to the league below. Player contracts are tiered so that the player will be paid differently depending on what league the team is playing in the current season.
I think there is a lot of this in the franchise model as wellā¦ salary cap mitigates this in the NFL a LOTā¦ but baseball hasnāt figured this out yet. I agree in Europe this can be a problem, but they are trying to fix this with their new financial accountability rules. It has mitigated the outrageous spending the past two years and crazy transfer fees.
See above on Wolfsburg & Leicester Cityā¦ yes, the worst teams get relegated, but a lot of teams narrowly survive and those are the ones that can do that same thing as Washington.
Check the last two years with the new financial measures Europe has implementedā¦ Current standings as of today have Nottingham Forests, Newcastle & Bournemouth in the top 7? Man United and Tottenham in the bottom half. It is going to continue in this direction more as the financials normalize.
ACC has added promotion/relegation of a sort with the various financial incentives.
Also, technically college hoops has promotion (think of all the used-to-be mid majors who are now in power conferences: Creighton, Xavier, Cincy, BYU, UCF, VPI, etc.). Relegation kinda happens, too (BC, Depaul) but they let you stay in the same conference.
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I like @lodger96ās point about Washington/underdogs. I want every team to have a chance to win the championship. (This has been much of the appeal of conference auto-bids in college basketball postseason; most everyone āhas a chanceā of a miracle run. Although even then there are conferences that donāt get auto-bids, so maybe @haney is right and we already have relegation, just via legal means. USA!)
What I like about promotion/relegation is that there are more ācut pointsā to get excited about. The NBAās play-in tournament, for instance, has turned one cut point (8th) into three (6th, 8th, 10th), and I think thatās worked out great (plus the play-in games are fun). But Iād prefer to add cut points in a way that doesnāt result in relegation (ādisqualified for next yearā).
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What if you are a fan of the Altoona Football team and they are in NFL Div 3? Altoona gets an owner that invests into it a lot and gets promoted over a couple years to Div 2 and then to Div 1. Super underdog story thereā¦ Altoona canāt do that todayā¦ places without NFL teams cannot do that today.
I still get it though about Washington and the argument is validā¦ I just see the argument above also being valid as an underdog story.
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Thatās valid too. There are middle grounds where you donāt DQ a team entirely. E.g. the D3 champ and D2 champ play, and the winner is in the NFL playoffs (replacing someoneās bye). So technically no one is ineligible.
Thatās sort of like giving an auto-bid to the SWAC. The winner is probably first-round cannon fodder (unless theyāre facing Virginia, sigh) but technically they still have a chance.
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I read an article in TA about the 6 maybe becoming 7 and the success of a couple of the upstarts was due to good player scouting or development or unique tactics. Iāll try to find it.
I should have gone further than just the EPL though. Real Madrid and Barca. PSG. Bayern. Inter. PSV and Ajax. Celtic and Rangers.
Those are only the ones I could name off the top of my head, Iām sure Iām missing a bunch.
Yepā¦ its across Europe. Iād leave Eindhoven and Ajax outā¦ they are both very good at using home grown talent.
Celtic and Rangers is no one wants to play north of Glasgow. Haha! Not really sure why Hearts canāt do the same thing in Edinburgh however
Atletico Madrid is up there (off topic noteā¦ there is an adult team in Richmond named Unatletico Richmondā¦ haha!) with Real and Barca.
Bayern yesā¦ but the Bundesliga always has the opportunity to surprise. Hoffenheim ,Wolfsburg, Dortmundā¦
PSG is just dumbā¦ Lille, Lyon & Marseille are the second level. Not sure how those 3 are doing this year.
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Iām a little late on this, but some rebuttals (and a chart!)
While it looks like FFP might be having an impact, and this seasonās table reflects that, it could also be a blip, because the last several decades results are a lot closer to lodgerās assertion. There are about 7 teams that are (pretty) consistently contending and making the UEFA. There are about 7 teams that pretty generally float in the middle. Contending once a decade or so, fighting releagation about that often, but not really challengers. Oh, thereās always an outlier or two, but pretty generally the West Hams donāt make UEFA (top 4, for those unfamiliar), but donāt have much struggle staying in the top table, and there are 10-12 teams that fight over the last 6 spots, rising and falling. (And Iām not looking all this up, nor is West Ham a team I follow, just my sense that theyāre pretty consistently mid-table).
This does make for late season drama in otherwise meaningless contests, but itās only of interest to the fans of those clubs and the others whose fates are tied to them. Sure, itās a massive game financially (because even with the umbrellas, itās catastrophic to drop - players leave, etcā¦) for, say, Everton vs. Bournemouth at the end of the 22/23 season, where an Everton loss puts them below Leicester City and maybe Leeds into the relegation zone, between two teams that finished 17th and 15th ā IOW, games nobody cares outside their fanbases ā and the fanbases of LC and Leeds.
But even with the massive financial cost of those games ā still nobody cared outside of those four teamsā fanbases. So it adds consequence to those games, but it doesnāt add interest.
[*Edited to add this tidbit that I found on Reddit but have not fact checked, so take it FWIW, as I need to go make dinner so I canāt chase it down:
*Some dude says: **
Everton likely would have gone bankrupt had they been relegated. Teams usually experience an initial 60-70% drop in income for their first 2-3 years down, going down to about 80-90% once parachute payments go away.
Most players have clauses in their contracts that if the club is relegated there is a reduction in their wage and often they have to sell top players to stay afloat."
And we did see this when Leeds United (States of America) got relegated with 3 USMNT players, all left. Not that that proves what some dude said, but it is further anecdotal evidence that itās a real effect.
The one real positive I see to the promotion/relegation system in the pros (I see no advantage to it in college), is that it forces owners to invest. You couldnāt have owners like the Sterlings in the NBA or whoever owns the Pirates in MLB who cashed luxury tax checks instead of investing in their teams because thereās a financial incentive to invest at least enough to stay ā¦ if not competitive, at least to stay out of the bottom.
In college, I donāt even see that advantage. And in college, under the franchise system you can move up. Some, at least. If you invest in sports and make it a priority (leaving aside the issue of whether or not colleges should be sports franchises to avoid muddying the waters), then you can climb to D-I. Iām not sure itās worth it, but the Altoona example could still happen. JMU has been steadily climbing, though P5(4?) status is still probably beyond their reach.
Here is a chart that shows how the English clubs have fared over the past couple of decades just in terms of āflightā participation. Notice how much yellow for the top 6. And most years, one of those 5 or 6 lifts the trophy.
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Yepā¦ very good perspective. I lived right outside of Oxford for a whileā¦ so Iāve experienced the aboveā¦ and its definitely possible it will endure.
I still like promotion/relegationā¦ and i loved all the promotion playoffs at Wembly.
Found this article, but it isnāt the one I remember reading before. Does the Premier Leagueās āBig Sixā still exist (on and off the pitch)? - The Athletic
Found it. It was ESPN. Five reasons why the Premier League's 'Big Six' era is over - ESPN
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Did a little more reading(err, lazy browsing, mostly involving wikipedia), and it looks like the data over 30 years of the EPL pretty much bear out that the top clubs shuffle their order, but rarely does anyone else crack the top. By the 00s, the terms was the Big 4, with the four clubs shuffling around, but only one or two interlopers (non big 4 teams), finishing in the top 4 for the entire decade. In the 10s, Tottenham and Man City joined the top clubs, which became a big 6 ā still only 6 of the 20 consistently finishing top 4 and making UEFA.
The Big 6 had 54 of the 60 top 6 finishes of the decade. The order shuffled, but only six times did any of the Big 6 finish out of the top 6. And only five other teams finished in the top 6 even once during that run. So there are 8 teams (well lots more had chances because of regulation), that didnāt finish in the top 6 even once in the decade. And if we make it top 4, there are very few teams in English football that have finished top 4 in the premier league era. Maybe 8? Out of a pool of hundreds, if I remember the English football system correctly.
The winners of all 32 EPL seasons have come from one of seven clubs, and three of those have one win.
Man United, Man City, Chelsea, or Arsenal have won 29 of 32 titles.
So, yeah, it injects some excitement into the low table race to avoid relegation (and joy for the teams that enjoy their moment in the EPL sun, however fleeting), but it honestly starts to seem like more of a sop to the teams in the middle to give them something to play for (avoiding relegation), since they know theyāre not winning the league.
hence the FFPā¦ and while you said thatā¦ it has just taken in effect the last few years. Clubs are scared at transfer windows to over commit funds to transfers and theyāve been pretty lame since the FFP started. Almost every major club is under some sort of scrutiny or investigation for their practices. The Glazers sold ManU after never being in the black. Man City still has a pretty good betting line for relegation due to the possible penalties that the arbiters may impose on them with loss of points. Everton almost went down due to a loss of points last year for FFP issues.
While in Englandā¦ there used to be two betting lines for the Championā¦ The first would be Champion and the second would be āChampion outside of the Top 6ā.
As an avid European football fanā¦ outside of UVA basketball, itās on all the time in my houseā¦ i enjoy that every game counts towards something. Top 7 in England qualify you for various European competitionsā¦ Champions League, Europa League (or whatever they call it now), there are even ways to qualify for stuff through fiar play (low amount of red/yellow cards).
Ive followed Fulham FC since I moved there in 2004ā¦ they are far from a top club but survived for years until being relegated to the Championship. They had a year that far exceed expectations and placed 7th in the Premier League. This put them in the Europa Cup the following year and with Clint Dempsey as their forward almost beat Atletico Madrid in the final.
They have had last day drama. There was a year where Brian McBride scored a header with less than 10 minutes on the last day in the last game to not get relegated. It makes sure there isnāt tanking and everyone fields their best teams in the league.
As a casual fanā¦ I donāt think it matters much, I agreeā¦ but if you are invested in the leagues and follow teams, promotion/relegation is awesome.
I could regale all my tales of FC Kaiserslautern tooā¦ but I think Fulham is a better one since most people understand the Premier League a bit more than the Bundesliga.
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