Though the fan following of college football back then isn't near what it is today. However, back then you may have had people that went to schools like VT have another college football favorite (i.e. Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio St, etc). You still see things like that today where people who go to Radford may prefer rooting for VT or UVA since they are in a major basketball conference. However, this isn't as usual nowadays since you have fans of JMU football who are full invested - or VT 30 years ago get fully invested since they saw their teams competing with the "big boys." In other words, if you had a breakaway of 30-40 teams 40 years ago, it wouldn't have been a big deal and any college football fan would have kept watching (especially when you just had an ABC game of the week). Now, if you do a breakaway of 30-40 teams, and teams like VT aren't included, you will either see those fans really caring about college football or follow whatever division VT ends up being in. Thus, your % of fans would go down (though the ones watching the breakaway may number more than what there were 40 years ago). I believe that is the balancing act - I believe you could get the bulk of fans onboard if there were 40-48 teams no matter the conference. However, if you keep all the teams in the SEC and Big Ten, I believe you would have to get closer to 60 teams to not alienate too many fans. I still think 56 is the sweet spot if you keep all of the SEC/B10 teams (thus, each conference would go to 28) - you get enough teams in that have a decent storied football past/background while reducing the original number of P5 schools - you could split each conference up in 4 divisions of 7 teams each - play each of your 6 division opponents once to keep some regional rivalries while playing 1-2 rotating opponents from other divisions in your conference as well as 1-2 teams from the other conference (depending on if the 56 teams want to play each other or still play teams outside once or twice). If you keep games just against the other 56 teams, you could just set it up like the NFL and have div winners w/ wild cards. And just like the NFL, you could divide the TV packages all over to increase $$$. ** Edited by The_VT_Rock at 5/28/2025, 12:24:14 PM