What Would College Football Conferences Be Without Gerrymandering?

Yesterday, Navy officially joined the American Athletic Conference. The Charlotte 49ers joined the FBS ranks in Conference USA and, in the Sun Belt, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern became bowl elligible after their moves up from the FCS.

These were some of the last aftershocks of the great conference quake from five years ago. You know, the one that gave us Texas A&M and Missouri in the SEC. The one that sent Colorado and Utah to the PAC-12 and sent Nebraska to the B1G. The one that moved Big East teams Louisville and West Virginia into other  top conferences, but left Cincinnati and Connecticut behind.

And now there are rumors that the Big12 wants to expand so it can, well, have 12 teams again.

Oh, and the Supreme Court just voted to allow Arizona to use an independent commission to draw district lines, a blow against gerrymandering.

If you're thinking that came out of left field, look at these college football teams and their conferences. The strange borders, the reaching tenticles, all tell-tale signs of gerrymandering. I couldn't even find a way to draw the borders of all ten conferences on one map!

So, even though conference realignment is drawing to a close, who's to say it won't happen again? How can we fight this? How can we prevent this?

Simple. Use the shortest split line algorthm to remove the gerrymandering and make 16 eight-team conferences based solely on geography. This has been done by the Center for Range Voting to show what the United States would look like if gerrymandering was removed from congressional districts.

What's the split line method? From vox.com:

Basically, they used the shortest possible line to cut a state into two halves with roughly equal populations. Then they did so again, and again, and again, until they had the proper number of overall districts.

With the (possibly temporary) loss of UAB and the addition of Charlotte, college football still has 128 teams at the FBS level. So we can use the shortest line possible to split the whole map of the United States in two, each side with 64 teams. Then split those regions into groups of 32 and so on, until we have 16 groups of eight. The shortest line ensures that the splitting was done based on geography and not based on someone's whims or prejudices.

And it looks like this.

Are you wondering which teams are in which regions? Here's a table.

And here's a map!

This does some great things for the sport we love. For one, Texas and Texas A&M are back together after all this time pretending they don't like each other! Boise State gets regular shots to prove its worth against Oregon and, well, that's it. Ohio State might finally fall to another team from Ohio for the first time since 1921 since it's forced to play three of them each year. In fact, lots of small schools will get plenty of chances to take down the big programs within their states.

Of course there would be drawbacks, too. Historical rivalries like Florida State-Miami, Michigan-Ohio State, Cal-Stanford and others are no longer paired together. Conference championships may or may not continue to exist. One purpose of redrawing the conference lines would be to prevent the purposeful separation of haves and have-nots (as the gerrymandering has clearly done), but this algorthm doesn't necessarily prevent it from happening accidentally. It also does nothing to ensure the new conferences are competitive. Using Bill Connelly's advanced stats projections for 2015, the Ozarks group and the Georgabama group are much, much better than everyone else, while the Northeast group is really, really bad.

So, yeah, it's not perfect. It doesn't fix everything and it has some unintended consequences. But you know what it does do? Give us something to talk about in July. Remove the conniving human element.

Auburn Specifics

First, Auburn has never played Georgia State, South Alabama, or Troy, so that gets remedied. Second, Auburn gets to keep its two main rivals in Alabama and Georgia, regain a long lost rival in Georgia Tech, and build on one with Florida State. By the way, that's five teams in the projected S&P+ top 20, a number matched only by the Ozarks group.

Read more

If you want to read more about gerrymandering in the real world, here is the website for the Center for Range Voting.

And here's is vox.com's Gerrymandering Explainer.