College Football Conferences and Competitive Balance

摘要

Several years ago, Rod Fort and I wrote a paper on college football in which we hypothesized that a first approximation to understanding the way in which the college football industry operates is to assume that college football programs, or at least the 'major' college football programs, are run to maximize the net income (including alumni donations and/or state or local government funding) arising from the program. Using a simplified model of the NCAA cartel rules under which college football operates, we argued that those rules would tend to produce problems of competitive balance within college football conferences, which in turn could lead to problems of instability in the membership of such conferences. In particular, we argued that college football teams located in the strongest drawing locations would field stronger teams, on average, than colleges in weak drawing areas, just as is the case in professional sports leagues. Concerning instability, we said the following: 'One consequence of the imbalance (in playing strengths within a league) is that if there is a great disparity in drawing potential between two conference colleges, either the weaker or the stronger, or both, will be under both internal and external pressures to leave the conference. Conferences thus tend to end up with members of similar drawing potential, just as they tend to end up with colleges of roughly similar academic standards.' (Fort and Quirk, 1999). Thus our argument was that a conference containing teams of markedly different drawing potential would be 'unstable', with pressures on the higher drawing and/or the lower drawing teams to exit the conference.