Geographically Better Conference Realignment for College Football 25

With Northern Illinois heading to the MWC (at least for college football), it’s just another in a long line of conference shake-ups that will continue to alter the college football landscape in the years ahead. And since we can do conference realignment in College Football 25, OSers have been thinking of various ways to do their own tinkering — and perhaps a “better” version of conference realignment that does not have to worry about the business side of things.

This idea was kicked off months ago by OSer Neinhardt, who had a lengthy post with detailed plans about geographic realignment. Neinhardt settled on a Power 5 conferences concept with a set number of teams and two divisions per conference. There is even a relegation idea to it, but the point was to try and keep things as geographically balanced while still retaining conferences with the same number of teams when possible.

This lead to others sharing their ideas, and OS vet studbucket posted his version of geographic realignment:

He was first and foremost concerned with the geographic aspect of things, and it mostly makes sense while retaining a lot of classic rivalries. The biggest changes in this sort of setup are how it alters the look of the SEC and ACC as that area of the US gets partitioned off into Appalachia, the Carolinas, the Deep South, and the Gulf States.

Whatever route you go, the important thing to remember if you tweak the conferences is that you’ll need to go into the rules for the conferences and make sure to set the amount of games to be played in each conference (base your decision on the number of teams in each conference). If you do not do this, schedules will be a mess for many teams as generally this means you’ll play too few conference games.