ClayNation: Conference vs. conference? I have a dream

As we enter the month before college football season arrives, sometimes I find myself daydreaming in the 100-degree heat of Nashville. This is particularly the case this year when it has been so hot and so dry they're actually advising people not to be outside exercising while the sun is out.

Usually my daydreams involve giving a sponge bath to Minka Kelly or Jessica Biel or some such, but with the onset of college football season my daydreams change to giving Jessica Biel a sponge bath in a steam room while Phil Fulmer draws offensive formations in the steam on the glass. Wait ... strike that. But, trust me, these daydreams involve college football.

Phil Fulmer, daydreams and steam rooms don't belong in the same sentence. (Getty Images)

For about a month I can forget that the relationship between college football's power structure and their fans is broken more than any sport in America. That college football fans are going to turn out by the millions to root on their favored teams even though we know all along that each week is more like a trip to the dentist for a root canal than an actual enjoyable football experience.

Each week holds the opportunity to crush your championship hopes and grind your would-be glass trophy into the hard jagged edges of cutting defeat. And even if, god forbid, your team traverses the slings and arrows of outrageous football fortune and emerges unscathed, you still might end up getting screwed by the idiocy of the current BCS system. But for a month, before the season really begins in earnest, these thoughts are ignored.

Even in late summer, I'm not willing to imagine a football playoff in my daydreams because I've heard too many times from too many officials in positions of prominence in NCAA football that there can't be a playoff because (insert sundry illegitimate and illogical reason here). Even though, as my column in a couple of weeks will demonstrate, every one of these arguments is actually insulting to every reasonably intelligent fan on earth.

So what I'm daydreaming about now is not even a playoff. Instead it's something that should happen at the start of each college football season.

What's the No. 1 debate that rages across the college football universe, excluding how many women on college campuses Kirk Herbstreit could sleep with if he was single? Whose conference is better, right? I've jumped into this fray, much to the chagrin of several Pac-10 fans, by crafting an extremely powerful and intellectual argument.

Namely, that the Pac-10 sucks except USC and the rest of the conference gets by on the "penumbra of hotness" factor that cloaks unattractive women who enter a bar behind an extremely attractive woman. But if you're like me, you see that the relative strength of conference argument motivates virtually every fan debate across the sweep of our college football country.

Yet, amazingly, we hardly ever see legitimate cross-conference challenges. When was the last time two national powers in the SEC or the Big Ten played a regular-season game? I can't even think of it. Sure, we get the bowl games when a handful of teams play. But those games merely leave us all wanting more and they generally feature the best teams of a conference as opposed to the worst.

True or false: Everyone sucks in the Pac-10 except for USC? (Getty Images)

There is no legitimate way to assess top to bottom conference strength. So, lately my daydream has been this -- why don't college football conferences stage challenges like college basketball conferences do? Especially now that we have a 12th game which virtually every team is stocking with a creampuff challenger.

Just imagine for a moment how spectacular this challenge would be. The top 11 SEC teams take on the top 11 Big Ten teams, the Big 12 lines up against the ACC, Pac-10 against the Big East. The possibilities are endless. Play half the games at one conference's home stadium and half the games at the other. And here's the kicker, you could play all these games over a long weekend before the NFL season even begins.

Just think about how unbelievable this would be for a college football fan. A game or two on Thursday night. Take Friday night off to allow high school football to reclaim the stage. Follow up with three or four games on Saturday, three or four more on Sunday and then, potentially, a couple games on Monday. Can you imagine what the ratings would be like to finally have a top-to-bottom conference tilt? The bragging rights in the winning part of the country that would ensue from these games? Talk about the perfect kickoff to a season.

How many other sports in American history spend as much time arguing about outcomes with no real way to ever provide any validity to these opinions? For once, college football could steal a march on other sports. Who wouldn't rather see their team and conference challenged than watch another series of games played against a small school brought in to take a whipping for cash?

You could rank the teams according to their preseason media rankings and line them up so they are evenly matched based on respective conference preseason standing. No. 1 vs. No. 1, 2 vs. 2 and so on down the line until 12 vs. 12 for those conferences with 12 schools. Set it up so each year the conference challenge would rotate to pit two new conferences against one another.

Snub 'em. (Getty Images)

Use the six major conferences and thumb your nose at snotty independents like Notre Dame. Wouldn't want to cut into their challenging service academy series. Then rotate your conference matchups around so that eventually every conference gets to play every other conference, but the teams are only on the hook to play every three or so years.

It would take more than a decade for each team to play each conference from top to bottom, but how much fun would this be to see happen? Especially once the tradition of the opening week conference challenge got rolling.

Of course you can argue that athletic directors would never go for such a challenge, that scheduling hardships keep games like these from becoming a reality because college football games are set years in advance, and any other litany of reasons why a challenge like this wouldn't work for college football. Which is all well and good.

Ask yourself this -- why is it that alone among all major sports, college football's powers-that-be never listen to what their fans want and consistently list reasons why things wouldn't work instead of why they would? In a globalized sports world, isn't this truly the height of arrogance? The non-responsiveness of college football leagues to their fans is sickening.

In the end, if the six major conferences foist off a conference challenge then have other conferences show what money and interest there would be by scheduling the WAC against the MAC or some such to start off the season. Perhaps eventually we can shame the larger conferences into agreeing to the conference challenge.

As for me, until that day, I'm just going to keep on summer daydreaming about the SEC mowing down the Pac-10 9-1 or 10-0. And keep picturing the resulting grief on west coast campuses as the Pac-10 guys try to wipe away their tears before they roll down into their turtlenecks. Keep imagining them so upset they can't even make it out to their weekly poetry slams. If only life could be so grand. But right now in college football we'll never know.

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Clay Travis is the author of Dixieland Delight: A Season on the Road in the Southeastern Conference, available July 31, 2007, from HarperCollins. Called "as indispensable to college football fans as ibuprofen on Sunday morning" by Warren St. John best selling author of Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, Dixieland Delight is Travis' hilarious, loving, irreverent and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.