Clearly what we all hate about college sports right now is the lack of stability in conference affiliations of teams, and of player affiliations with those teams. Schools are moving around and changing conferences constantly, to the point where it is hard to remember who is in what conference and whether the conferences make any geographic sense. As for the players, it is now so easy to transfer that every season is a bidding war for the best players and some teams basically start over from scratch every single year.

The NCAA is clearly toothless, but could a new governing body be created that oversees the top 64 NCAA programs, and creates four sixteen team conferences that make sense based on geography and traditional rivalries? No one except the governing body (presumably, representatives from all sixty-four schools) would have the power to make new conferences or change the alignments of the teams within those conferences. Players would sign binding contracts with schools just like in the professional ranks.

Are there any downsides to this type of model?