The Josh Innes Show - We Need Relegation In College Football

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Well, we have another change to the College Football Playoff seeding. I'm fine with the change. It pretty much confirms that conferences outside of the SEC and Big 10 don't matter. That said, it really is time to cut the crap and create a relegation system for college football. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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playoff seeding is. It's fairly simple, but essentially last year division winners or conference winners would get buys into the second round, right? So the new policy will no longer include an opening round buy for the four highest ranked conference champions, though the top five conference winners will still receive, or the five top conference winners will still receive automatic playoff bids. Instead, the four highest ranked teams, regardless of conference championships won, will receive that by into the quarterfinals. In the case

of that, one or more of the top five ranked conference champions rank outside the top twelve of the final rankings, that team or those teams will move into the top 12 and displace any non-conference winners. So ultimately here's what needs to happen. I'm fine with this. Like this could be a way that you can avoid having to hear teams from the SEC bitch when like the sixth best SEC team which in reality is probably better than the second or third best ACC teams in many years. You hear these people bitch all the time and they like to dick swing about how they're in the SEC. Like basically, there are teams that don't belong but because they're in

the SEC and they play a tougher schedule, by association they think they belong or because you're in the Big Ten they think they belong. Basically, this is just a way for the SEC and the Big Ten to continue to benefit from this while these other conferences don't. But the reality is the Big 12 ain't that good. The ACC ain't that good. Right? So you start looking at some of these other leagues and if it means you're getting the best teams in and you're getting

the most talented teams in and the most watchable teams in, I guess I'm fine with it. It's okay. Look, I'm going to live with whatever they do because the obvious answer for what needs to happen and what needs to be done in college football has not been done and maybe it will never be done, but if it does happen, then you've got me really on board. This, you can move things around and say, okay, this team gets the buy, this team gets this, this, it doesn't fucking matter. If you get 12 teams in and my team's one of them, great, if not, then it sucks,

right? But there's one thing that can be done. And if they would do this, it would make it exponentially better. We will talk about that after these words. FanDuel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning, which beats even the 27th best feeling saying I do. Who wants his last parachute? I do.

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football. And if you can think of a sport where it would really make the most sense, really you could argue that college football would be the one. Like it might be more difficult to pull that off in pro sports because there are so few teams in professional sports leagues. I'd still want to see them do it. I don't think the NFL needs to relegate but if baseball would relegate, if basketball would relegate, if hockey would relegate, I think that'd be fucking cool as hell. But like you know that's tougher because there's only 30, 31, 32 teams in there. But if you look at the

idea of relegation for college football where there's a hundred, what, 130 Division 1 teams or whatever it is, that gives you ample opportunity for relegation and it would be freaking awesome, right? I've got to find the actual relegation story. It was at DraftKings, I guess last week, maybe a week or two ago, I saw it on the DraftKings Instagram account, but when I read the way they broke down the idea of relegation in college football, dude, give it to me. Like, I don't know how you'd pick and choose which teams get to start out in the top tier, who are in the middle tier, and who are in the bottom tier to start, but like you'd have a pretty good idea of who would start in the top tier. They'd have to come up with a way to like make it seem fair, but you're like your gold standard programs, right? You're ones that win consistently. Maybe you look for the schools that have had

the highest winning percentage in the last five years, ten years, I don't know, but the Alabamas, the LSUs, the USCs, the Oklahomas, like the big brands can be in that top one, although USC hasn't done much in recent years and Oklahoma hasn't done much here at least recently. So I mean there's a debate for who would be in there but shit like that's what I'm here for. Give me relegation. I don't ask for a lot of you people but I do ask for you to give me relegation in college football. Relegation in college football would totally change the game and make things more interesting and it would be more fun. Probably tougher in the pro game,

obviously tougher in the pro game. So again, I'd like to see that too. I think relegation puts everybody on watch. It makes everybody alert. You have to win. You have to guarantee that there's less money to be made if you drop down in relegation. But like let's just say you took, you know, I don't know. Again, I don't know the exact number of college football teams there are that are in Division I, but let's say you take the first crew of them, which is your first class programs, then the bottom number of those guys that don't make it up, they end up having to drop down to the second. That's how relegation works.

Top handful of teams from Division II move up to Division I. The bottom teams from the other one move down to Division 2 and that impacts your revenue, that impacts your television appearances, it impacts everything. That would make it dramatic and more fun and you'd probably have a more realistic national champion because like everybody wants to see like the little guy in the national championship and have a shot. What you really want to see is each group of people in each school, I should say, each university that is on its realistic level have a chance to compete for some form of a championship, right? Like if you're looking like your LSUs, your Alabamas, your major universities, your Ohio states,

your Michigans, these prime powers, on a year in year out basis. Those are the schools that have the money and those are the schools that should be competing for the national championship. But what's wrong with the next group of teams being 30 or 40 deep and they're all competing to win the championship which guarantees that you move on into the big league or like four teams move on if you make it to the final four you play for a champion whatever the fuck it is like you can set it up however you want to set it up build a playoff I don't care again I'm not an expert on such things and I don't have all the exact numbers I was just reading this story a second ago about how this new playoff system is going down with college football which I'm fine with don't care. I love to watch college football.

It is what it is. It is kind of fucked up that a team wins a conference. Here's what you don't like about this the way they're doing it because last year it left it open for interpretation about whether or not they consider the ACC and the Big 12 on par with those other leagues, right? By saying that the division champion of the ACC warrants a buy, you're obviously saying then that you consider the ACC to be on the same level as the SEC and the Big 12 and thus we should evaluate it as such. Now

by saying that the top 12 teams are going to be seated that way and yes, winning your conference will guarantee you a spot in the top 12, but they're now telling us that, hey, we know that you're the SEC and Big Ten are the big dogs and we now can confirm that the ACC is not and the Big 12 is not. You know what I'm saying? Like last year that was the big debate is, well, if you want to tell me that a conference champion is worthy of being in this playoff and having a buy, then how does Ole Miss have a case for being

in when there was a division champion that's getting this bye? Now they're essentially telling you that they're the big dogs and then there are these lesser teams. And I'm fine with that. Basically they're saying, great, you won some Pidley division, but LSU came in third in the SEC, but they didn't play in the Conference Championship game yet. You know based on their schedule and the fact that they just happened to lose one game to Alabama so Alabama got in blah blah blah and it worked out this way that LSU in this hypothetical LSU is still going to have a higher seed than you even though you won the

Conference Championship. But I like that. I think that's good. I think that's right for the sport, but to really make things right. Relegation, that's what we need. They got to a big debate on this on this DraftKings Instagram post and I for the life of me could not find this thing. But it was and people are just yelling at each other over it on here bitching about it like, Oh, what do you mean that team is going to be in the top class? It's not a matter of who should be in the A group, the B group or the C group. It's a matter of whether or not the idea of relegation should exist. We

can work on the logistics of it and all the details of it at another time, but this is certainly a thing that needs to happen and it would make things a lot more interesting. It would make things a lot more fun and it would actually be more balanced and fair in that way as well. So do it. I'd like to see that. Please give me that. Pro sports would be more difficult obviously because there's so few teams but like in a perfect world you'd have a setup where like there's a chance that the shitty Pittsburgh Pirates could end up playing in the Pacific Coast League. You know, that would be fun to me. Like they're in a lesser league. Like look, I'm reading a story today where they're asking the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates if it's

possible that they trade Paul Skeens. Now, one pitcher obviously doesn't make your ball club good or bad because obviously the Pittsburgh Pirates are terrible and they have been terrible for a decade now so it's not like the Pirates having one-star pitchers going to make or break them as an organization but that is a cornerstone piece of a franchise with Paul Skeens. If they traded Paul Skeens they should lose their status as a Major League Baseball team because they at that point are not trying to win baseball games. They're already not trying to win. They have a low payroll. They're not giving a shit about the, like they don't care. Like every year they just roll a team out there, pay $80

million in payroll, lose 100 games and move on to the next one. But if they were to go out in year two of Paul Skeens and be like, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna trade Paul Skeens. Possible generational pitcher. Guy could be the frontline starter for a team if we made the right moves, tried to build a good team around him. If they were to trade him, they should be sent down to the California penal league and it should take a lot of effort to get back into Major League Baseball if that's what you're going to do. But relegation would be so much fun because then you'd punish shitty teams like the Pirates, but you'd

have to make it a situation where their money would be less like you would not you'd have a lower payroll or whatever it would be you'd have to the revenues would have to be down because the reason why a lot of these baseball teams and other leagues have teams that just never try is because they're still making a fuck ton of money. Like the Pirates, I guarantee you, are making a shit ton of money still. I guarantee you low-end basketball teams, the Charlotte Hornets are probably still making cash, right? Bad teams still make cash and at times there's no incentive to ever be better because you just, hey, it's a business, you're

collecting cash, you're not driven to win. Well what if the more you lose, the less money you make? What if the lesser league you're in, the revenues go down, the TV contracts are worse? And that's why, again, pro sports would be far more difficult to do because of TV deals and everything else, but it would be better for the overall health of the sport to me, big picture, because it would make teams more competitive, it would give lesser teams an opportunity to still be competing for something right. You'd still have an opportunity if you're in that middle tier.

Your dream is to move up to the big tier and if you get up to the big tier, your dream is to stay there and to compete for the actual championship. That's good **** Soccer's got it right over in England. They got it right. What the **** are we doing man sitting around here with teams that are never gonna have a chance to compete because their owners really don't even want to compete like Pittsburgh, like fucking Colorado. Colorado is on pace to have the worst baseball season ever at this point. They have eight wins. It is almost June. They have eight wins. We were shitting on the White Sox last

year for that. Oh boy, the White Sox. Eight wins unless they won one yesterday that I don't know about. Let's get an update. Really quick update on what's going on with the Colorado Rockies. The Colorado Rockies as it stands now, they are bottom of the... Nope, they still have eight wins. Eight and 42. They are 23 games out of first place. It is May 23rd. The next closest or the next furthest team out, the White Sox, are 17 and a half out of the American League Central. That is where we are right now, kiddos. So you want to tell me like that they

should keep being rewarded and keep making money while they're not even making a legit attempt to win baseball games or rolling out that dog shit on a night in night out basis. Now imagine the Colorado Rockies weren't guaranteed to be in Major League Baseball. Imagine that there was a risk that they would go down to the Pacific Coast League or some other AA League or something like that, the Pioneer League.

Imagine that were to happen and maybe that changes your strategy and your desire to be a competitive baseball team. That's the kind of shit we need to be looking at that would make things better. But I think a place where it could truly start is college sports because there are so many teams and there are so many clear haves and have nots financially, etc. Yes, the gap has been bridged a little bit because of the NIL stuff. So like an SMU who in theory has no business

being a competitor with an LSU in Alabama, Florida money-wise or in Ohio State or Michigan. Well, you get one big money dude that now wants to spend huge bucks at SMU and now SMU can go get people and SMU's a big dog. So like a school who like SMU could have been a Conference USA school 10 years ago, Conference USA or not, they can now be a big money player and buy and play

their way into the top tier of the relegation system. They can be in the top tier. You know, if a UAB wanted to spend the bucks, they could get there. Like that would be fun. Give me that. Like I'm glad that you keep moving and shaking with the playoff system and now if you know you win the shitty ACC, you're not guaranteed to buy and now we know that divisions really don't or conferences really don't matter. Great. Give me relegation. It's all I ask for. Do it you cowards.