It’s interesting that, in a week that started with tremendous controversy as to whether one team or another should have been selected to the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, that an announcement came which could wind up being the wave of the future in American sports.
The announcement surrounded the concept of promotion and relegation, where several interconnected leagues interchange teams on an annual basis. The winner and other best teams from a lower league would win promotion to a higher league, while the losing team(s) from an upper division would be relegated to a lower league.
Yesterday’s annoucement surrounded the United Soccer Leagues, a soccer business which has been in operation for decades in the U.S., but is finally adopting a promotion/relegation model for three of its men’s soccer leagues — USL Premier (which will be starting in a few years), along with the current USL Championship and USL League 1.
We’ve written about pro/rel in the past, but I think the USL announcement could shift the debate. But that’s because the USL is the organizer of the leagues and can pretty much do what it wants. It’s not like Major League Soccer, where ownership groups are ponying up larger and larger franchise fees to join the league. San Diego FC, for example, isn’t paying a half-billion dollars for an opportunity to be relegated to a lower division after one season.
Which brings us to the current kerfuffle in college basketball — nay, all of college sports.
There are many college teams which I have noted, in many sports, which are either luckless, hapless, or where the athletic administration makes little to no effort to give the players and coaches the tools and resources to succeed.
I’m amazed that some college sports teams can putter along, year on year, finishing below .500 on the season and missing the conference tournament, without systemic change within the athletic administration to improve the team. All the A.D. will do for certain teams is to provide a field and provide offices for the coaches. And little else.
That’s because, in college sports, there is no concept of promotion or relegation. Sure, there have been teams which have moved up in terms of their competition such as Bryant and the University of California, San Diego. Others, like the University of Hartford, have moved down. But these are individual universities who have chosen to move their entire athletic program, no matter how successful their teams are in individual sports.
A big part of the reason why there hasn’t been promotion or relegation in college sports is location. In the Ivy League, for example, travel partners are pretty well established in many competitions like hockey and basketball. Traditionally, a team would play Cornell and Columbia the same weekend. Same with Harvard and Dartmouth, Yale and Brown, and Princeton and Pennsylvania.
Those travel dyads have remained in many Ivy League sports to this very day, even in revenue sports such as basketball.
Of course, with the inception of coast-to-coast conference competition in the ACC and Big Ten, scheduling and travel are complex. If there was promotion and relegation in each individual sport — especially in sports like field hockey and lacrosse where teams are widespread across the U.S. — the result is likely to be an unorganized morass.
Then again, that’s a reflection on what college sports is right now.