Introducing Relegation to College Football-- SBNation

With realignment rumors swirling and threatening to destabilize the tenuous new equilibrium of college athletics, our editors at SBNation decided that it would be worthwhile purely as a fun exercise to see how relegation, the process by which teams are promoted/demoted in European soccer leagues, would affect college football if instituted in the good old US of A. Spencer Hall of EDSBS fame posted the first installment in SBNation's series yesterday that surveyed the current scheme of conference-based alignments in CFB. He argued that CFB needs the pressure for success that relegation brings along with its excitement; there can be no greater desire to win than from a fanbase facing a drop to the Missouri Valley Conference (or the like) from the world of the BCS.

Today's installment from SBNation CFB Editor Jason Kirk provides a basic FAQ for how such a system might work; after all, our American system of college athletics isn't perfectly suited for a pure transfer of the European model over here.

Like I said, this is just a fun exercise that SBNation and a few of its member blogs are doing to explore the topic. Realignment is back at the forefront of the collective mind of college athletics. Its aims are guided mostly by money. This topic, rather than looking solely at the butts in the seats, TV ratings, or memorabilia says, tries a qualitative approach. What would happen if every team had to play for its major football life every season?