Why Boise State's Mike Walsh is proposing a system-shattering promotion-relegation plan for college football

Mike Walsh is Boise State's associate athletic director for strategic communications and business development. And his Broncos boss, Jeramiah Dickey, has a saying.

"My athletic director loves to say, 'Stop living the definition of insanity; stop trying to do things the same way and expect a different result,'" Walsh said. "When you can take that mindset and move toward trying something new and putting it on paper and really talking through the 'Why?' then we can maybe start to make some progress on beneficial changes and alternatives."

Walsh did just that recently when he proposed a system-shattering promotion-relegation plan for college football's Western-based Group of 5 level, which would include 24 schools. With the power-conference structure shrinking to four conferences with the Pac-12 down to two schools, Walsh crafted a 22-slide PowerPoint that was presented to Mountain West commissioner Gloria Nevarez, among others.

"The motivation is pretty simple," Walsh said. "The gap between the haves and have nots doesn't appear to be getting any smaller. There's change coming left and right across the college landscape, and no one's going to do it for us. Trying to put something together that leads to a conversation where we can start to have some discussion around doing things a little bit differently, maybe a little bit more advantageous for people in our situation, it's kind of admitting where we are in the landscape and trying to figure out a way to fit ourselves in a little bit better in the future."

Walsh's proposal would be a results-based plan where teams would move up and down a three-tiered conference system in football only based upon how they perform in that sport. While more details would need to be fleshed out, the main selling point is it would allow Group of 5 teams the ability to increase their television revenue by excelling on the field while increasing excitement for non-power-conference schools.

"Finding a way for the model to be three independent conferences that come together and work toward an alliance for football and for media-rights distribution is the goal here so you can continue to have those independently operated conferences in the non-football sports that do have their (automatic qualifying) status," Walsh said. "But maybe there's a scheduling alliance and understanding of how those schools fit within the ecosystem. The idea is to leverage football and the media assets that come with football to create compelling content, which is really what promotion-relegation can provide. The compelling games, the games of consequence as they're dubbed in the proposal.

"Then taking it a step further, if this proposal and this concept is of interest and ultimately you're making an admission that entertainment is really at the top of the food chain as far as what you're trying to prioritize, if you can get there and you can jump two feet in, we're now talking about off-field content, we're talking about more day-to-day programing, Hard Knocks-type content, things like that. If you can make that admission, then maybe in the tiers two and three you start to trial and error."

Walsh said some of the trial-and-error things could include on-field interviews, in-game interviews and other access points that would increase viewership and engagement and potentially drive larger media-rights deals that conferences like the Mountain West currently enjoy. Non-Boise State MW schools get $3.2 million per year from its television partners, which pales in comparison to power conferences like the SEC and Big Ten (nearing $70 million per school), ACC (around $35 million per school) and Big 12 (around $32 million per school). Even the American Athletic Conference (around $7 million per school) more than doubles the MW payouts.

Walsh's model also would allow non-football sports to stay in more geographically aligned conferences to minimize travel costs and school time missed, which was not taken into consideration with schools like USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon joining the Big Ten and Stanford and Cal leaving for the ACC, a conference completely in the East Coast except for those additions.

For this radical plan to happen, it would take the buy-in from multiple conferences and media-rights partners, so it still appears to be a long shot this is the path forward for Pac-12 leftovers Oregon State and Washington State and the MW. But it marks the first time anybody has put a plan like this on paper and had it internally discussed and considered by high-level college athletic administrators.

"I think the initial response has been super positive," Walsh said. "What we heard a lot of was it's intuitive and the way things were laid out was easy to understand and pick up on. The best part of it in my mind was being able to hear, 'Here's things that we do think have some legs and there's some legitimacy here. Maybe here's a couple of things that aren't really that viable or feasible.' But that's not the end of the discussion. I think that's where this was probably a little bit different than maybe previous conversations around promotion and relegation or doing things differently is previously it was pretty surface level and you could pretty easily just shoot holes in it, say, 'No, that's not what we're looking to do.' With this, there was more of a conversation."

Walsh said the number of schools in power conferences is likely to shrink in the future. That will push teams in the group below, where schools like Nevada reside, to differentiate themselves. That's two-fold. First, it could increase media-right money in the short term. Second, this three-league promotion-relegation consortium could become an attractive long-term option for teams that lose power-conference status in the future.

"What's going to happen to them?" Walsh said. "And how in the meantime can we at our level create something they will want to be a part of, that has so much value they will see value in being a part of that rather than maybe creating another tier in between where we're at and where we want to be?"

Walsh said one of the benefits of a promotion/relegation system is the excitement it can build throughout the season, which would culminate in high-stakes games for teams that could move up or down a league depending upon that game's result. Walsh said there are other important games built into the hypothetical schedule. For example, a team that finishes in the top four of their league would host a team from the league above the following season, which could lead to more attractive home games and larger attendance numbers.

"It's not just for TV dollars," Walsh said. "We're talking about the difference you would make in a gate for somebody who gets to host, the difference between schools like Nevada being able to host a school like Oregon State versus hosting a school they may traditionally see come their way more often. But if you can have that upper-tier school coming to your venue, it's going to create an opportunity with the gate, but it's also going to create opportunities for people to get excited. That's something to play for, it's something to talk about. It's not just the TV dollar that you're going after. It's creating a way that people stay invested and can create incremental revenue streams as well."

You can watch Mike Walsh's full NSN Tonight interview below.