Perhaps you follow soccer. Perhaps you’re like the rest of America. In the great international leagues, though, only the best can compete for the top prize. The worst are first forced out of the elite company and then forced to earn entry into the upper echelon. It’s called relegation and it’s beautiful.

And it make so much sense if applied elsewhere. Like, for example, college football, which could use a purging.

If the eventual 120 teams is too much, let’s agree to lop off, say, 24 and do so responsibly.

There are 12 conferences in college football – well, 11 plus the collection of independents.

The last-place team in each division of the ACC, Big 12, Conference USA, Mid-American and SEC are relegated. The bottom two teams in the Big East, Big Ten, Mountain West, Pac-10, Sunbelt, WAC and the collection of independents also are relegated.

Radical? Yes. June? Also yes. Easily dismissed? Notuh. There are ways to do it — ways better than mine, I now must admit — and to make it work. As you might expect, the feedback flowed, but only one person called me an idiot. He does that a lot, though. There were some good ideas and I’m sure there are more out there (hint, hint). Here’s the best so far:

I have always found this to be an interesting solution to the bowl/national champion problem.  I know its never gonna happen but wouldnt it be great if you took the top 13 teams in the country (based on this years polls) and put them into group 1.

Make them play each other and that would be the champion.  Put the next thirteen into group 2, and so on and so forth.  At the end of the year you could take the bottom three of each group and bump them down and take the top three of each group (or four) and bump them up? Hell if you wanted you could set up a relegation tournament (like they have in soccer) and make those teams play each other (could take the place of meaningless bowl games) to see who gets to stay and who falls.

Gone would be the days of debates over who has the best and worse conference. Gone would be the days when a UTAH gets no respect. Ohio State wouldn’t be able to be overrated. Forget teams padding their schedule with crappy lower division opponents. Every team would be meaningful and the rewards would be great. That would give an incentive for true underdog teams to advance.  In my opinion that would make the season much more exciting.