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.

South California
Hawaii	Stanford	San Jose State	Fresno State
UNLV	USC	UCLA	San Diego State
Northwest
California	Nevada	Boise State	Oregon
Oregon State	Washington	Washington State	Idaho
Big Empty
Utah State	Utah	Minnesota	Wyoming
Colorado State	Colorado	Nebraska	Kansas State
Old West
BYU	Air Force	Arizona State	Arizona
New Mexico	New Mexico State	UTEP	Texas Tech
WIMI
Wisconsin	Iowa State	Iowa	Northern Illinois
Northwestern	Kansas	Missouri	Illinois
Ozarks
Oklahoma	Oklahoma State	Tulsa	Arkansas
Arkansas State	Memphis	Ole Miss	Mississippi State
Central Texas
North Texas	TCU	SMU	Baylor
Texas A&M	Texas	Texas State	UTSA
Loutexassippi
Rice	Houston	Louisiana Tech	UL-Monroe
UL-Lafayette	LSU	Tulane	Southern Miss
Michigan and more
Central Michigan	Michigan State	Notre Dame	Western Michigan
Michigan	Eastern Michigan	Toledo	Bowling Green
Ohiana
Purdue	Ball State	Indiana	Miami (Ohio)
Cincinnati	Ohio State	Ohio	Marshall
Tenntucky
Louisville	Kentucky	Western Kentucky	Vanderbilt
Middle Tennessee	Tennessee	Appalachian State	Clemson
Georgabama
Alabama	Auburn	Georgia Tech	Georgia State
Georgia	Troy	South Alabama	Florida State
Northeast
Buffalo	Syracuse	Temple	Rutgers
Army	UMass	UConn	Boston College
Mid-Atlantic
Akron	Kent State	Pittsburgh	Penn State
West Virginia	Virginia	Maryland	Navy
Virgolina
Virginia Tech	Old Dominion	Wake Forest	Charlotte
North Carolina	Duke	NC State	East Carolina
Florida-Georgia DO NOT SAY LINE
South Carolina	Georgia Southern	Florida	Central Florida
South Florida	Florida Atlantic	Florida International	Miami

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.

Region Name	Avg Proj S&P+	rk
Ozarks	6.750	1
Georgabama	6.450	2
Tenntucky	1.925	3
Big Empty	1.363	4
Northwest	1.313	5
Mid-Atlantic	0.638	6
WIMI	0.450	7
Florida-Georgia DO NOT SAY LINE	-0.313	8
Michigan and more	-0.475	9
South California	-0.650	10
Ohiana	-1.038	11
Central Texas	-1.375	12
Old West	-2.225	13
Virgolina	-2.463	14
Loutexassippi	-3.888	15
Northeast	-8.575	16

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

Georgabama
Alabama	Auburn	Georgia Tech	Georgia State
Georgia	Troy	South Alabama	Florida State

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.