Ikr, they just need to formalize it. Seeing like UAF vs Coastal Carolina duke it out to make the SEC would be awesome, as opposed to just reading dumb headlines in May about teams switching around arbitrarily

College even has the fucking framework for it; conferences, divisions.

We have it, just without it being based on record. Temple got relegated when the Big East booted them. Oregon State and Washington State got relegated when their conference mates bolted. SMU, TCU, Rice, and Houston got relegated when the Big Eight raided the SWC.

That’s not relegation lol. Nebraska is in no danger of going to the MAC or C-USA. Purdue is in no danger of that.

A conference going under is not even close to the concept of relegation

Relegation only works in the context of a truly international sport, where clubs have to focus not only on domestic titles but international ones as well. No major American sports league would benefit from relegation.

I agree not to mention there’s no where enough NBA talent for it to be somewhat interesting.

It especially doesn’t make sense in America where teams extort tax payers for stadiums. Imagine you are a taxpayer/fan who is on the hook for hundreds of millions for a team that gets relegated before the stadium is even done being built. Talk about insult to injury.

In many ways, the point of relegation is that it’s giving up on the idea of parity. A relegation system gives every team the same opportunity to compete in theory but endorses the idea that not every team is competitive in practice, and so it rewards teams that find some way or another to be competitive.

But I’d push back on the idea that it eliminates certain markets from ever having a shot. Firstly, the American system does that already (if you’re not big enough to have one of the ~30 teams, you have no shot).

But secondly - to use London as an example, London may be the biggest market in British football by a pretty wide margin, there’s 16 London-based professional teams in Association football. Because the London market is split into so many slices, the gap in value between being in the London market vs. being in a market which is smaller but split fewer ways isn’t as big.

As a result, looking at Forbes estimates, the top two most valuable teams in British football, Manchester United and Liverpool, are in the 6th and 4th biggest urban areas in England (respectively). By contrast, the Knicks were still one of the most valuable NBA teams even deep into its decades-long title drought solely by virtue of being one of only two teams in New York, while the Clippers are still the #4 ranked team by value despite not having achieved anything in their history.

Relegation rewards teams that have historically been successful, but even if we park the dark horse stories like Leicester city, there isn’t always an 100% clear link that being in a big market makes you successful. Bournemouth is the 26th biggest urban area in England (with <200k people; even cutting London into 17 slices, each slices is over twice as large) but their team has been in the Premier League for 10 of the last 12 years.

Relegation works in a context where every town has its own professional or semi-professional team and large cities have multiple, allowing the system to reward teams that improve and punish teams that fail. It probably wouldn’t work in a context where you just combine the NBA and G-league and now teams face a nominal risk of relegation if they can’t outperform teams that never had any semblance of functioning as independent clubs.

I don’t think it can happen in North American sports simply because of how rich the premier sports teams in the US are compared to the second-rate teams.

The Warriors would have been regulated for a season because of how injured they were and then probably would have been undefeated in the G League

Give me a break, you’re just salty the Knicks didn’t get the Mavs protected pick that year. It was a tank job, but let’s not pretend like the Mavericks are even a top five offender. They didn’t tank last year and it cost them. That game is certainly not the first thing that should be brought up as a reason for relegation lol

You would also lose historical matchups to make this happen. Alabama could maybe still play a single rival like Auburn, but the Super Tier would require them to play against other Super Tier members for the majority of their games.

That’s why the proposed Super League fell apart.

They’ll make it to 5-37 with Russ averaging a triple double on 40% TS

assuming 3 are fully healthy, i think they go 42-0 even with me as the point guard, i’m not even kidding.

Probably 42

I didn’t remember that. That sound incredibly sad indeed.

He did never make it to Canada, but Toronto traded him to Phoenix for a mostly washed Sebastian Telfair, where they both finished out their seasons and played in China the next year.

game moves too fast for traditional bigs. lots of players got phased out if they couldnt defend perimeter or shoot

Traditional bigs got phased out in the NBA unfortunately for him.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

I have a lot of friends who went there – Oberlin’s football team actually launched the career of John Heisman, but yeah they have been absolutely godawful for like 100 years

That seems to be Caltech’s athletics niche

Their baseball team broke a 228 game losing streak that lasted nearly ten years in 2013

To force their students to get outside and touch grass every now and then. Winning is completely secondary. At the end of the day, it’s still a sports program at possibly the best science and engineering university in the world.