Are you ready for a dose of common sense?
One conference. Every team. Divisions are aligned by geography.
“Do it like the NFL, where there’s NFC West, NFC North, NFC South where it’s the same thing and then we all get together,” Kelly, who coached for four seasons in the NFL before coming to UCLA, said Friday morning. “But I think there should be one conference in all of college football and just break it up like they do in the professional ranks. … That makes the most sense. There’s your travel question, there’s all those other questions.”
Traditionalists can only daydream about such simplicity, especially after Action Network and other outlets reported Oregon and Washington are joining UCLA and USC in the Big Ten Conference in 2024.
The departure of the Ducks and Huskies could spell the end of the Pac-12 since further defections are almost assured. Meanwhile, Florida State officials have publicly stated they’re looking to bolt the Atlantic Coast Conference in hopes of a more lucrative future, even reportedly engaging private equity firms as potential investment partners.
At least UCLA knows where it’s headed thanks to its switch to the Big Ten, which now stands at 18 teams for the moment. Kelly praised UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who earlier this week announced he was leaving his post after 17 years, for having the foresight to approve a conference move shepherded by athletic director Martin Jarmond.
“When you look at the landscape of where we are now,” Kelly said, “you give [Block] great credit for being able to stay ahead when other people are scrambling to find spots now and the fact that we know where we’re going to be in 2024 and beyond, he deserves a ton of credit for that.”
The additions of Oregon and Washington could alleviate some travel concerns for UCLA and USC while preserving those rivalries, though the Trojans and Bruins were not believed to be in favor of the Ducks accompanying them to the Big Ten.
Based on his studies of sleep and performance related to travel when he coached in the NFL, Kelly said he didn’t anticipate many adjustments with the Bruins traveling to the Midwest and the East Coast to play in the Big Ten.
“If you’re only there for less than 36 hours, there is no jetlag,” Kelly said, alluding to his experiences. “You stay on your body clock. What we did when we were in San Francisco and we had to go play Carolina, it’s just a 10 a.m. start for us, but we were on the field for practice at 10 a.m., so it really wasn’t that much different.
“When we go to play an East Coast team in the Big Ten a year from now, they’ve told us we won’t play any games before 12:30 p.m. our time, so that would be a 3:30 kick for them, so we’ll stay on our same time schedule because we would leave on Friday, play a game — which would be noon for us, 3 for them — on Saturday and then get on a plane and come back, so it doesn’t affect you from that standpoint because you’re only there for a short time, so you really try to stay on the same schedule that you’ve been on for the whole time.”
Kelly said he spent little time pondering realignment, in part, because he has no say in the matter and no one asks his opinion. His proposed solution suggested he had given the topic some thought, though there were obviously some possible sticking points. Why would a powerhouse like Alabama be willing to subsidize the weaker teams in a massive conference?
“That’s a great question,” Kelly said. “That’s why I don’t think about it very much.”