Division 1 Esports (D1E) is a league designed around traditional athletic conferences of division 1 schools (i.e. Big Ten, Big 12, Big East etc.). The model would follow that of Collegiate Conference Series (CCS), with groups being based on the athletic conferences, a group “conference championship” playoffs, and a March Madness style bracket at the end. Also included would be the Poll system that CCS has, where a Top 25 poll is released for each game.
Why?
The Collegiate Esports scene has been…rough. There are a bunch of different leagues all offering multiple games, there are leagues for each specific game run by the publishers, and there are conference leagues run by the schools of the conference in various forms. Everything is very chaotic, and it doesn’t seem like much attention is put on any one thing. Having a single league to point to as the model of “NCAA Esports” would be helpful not only in convincing more schools to put money into it, but also in getting more people interested in esports as a whole. Telling fans of your school to follow five different leagues to see how their schools Esports team is doing is less likely to get them invested. Telling them they can follow one league, see a weekly poll with their school ranked on it for a game, watching a March Madness style selection show to see where their team gets seeded, THAT will get people invested.
How?
I foresee this working similarly to Collegiate Conference Series. Everything can pretty easily run out of a Discord server, using something like Challonge for matches and Discord threads to keep track of match scores, reschedules etc. Everyone in these schools has been around for long enough that they understand how these things work, how to do score reporting, reschedule matches. All that’s really needed (in my opinion) is a platform for competition between these schools.
Another thing that I think is very important: student and school run league. Students are the lifeblood of College Esports. I’m a student myself, even if I won’t be for much longer. I think we all have seen the various problems with other leagues that AREN’T run by students. That’s not to say that directors or school staff shouldn’t be involved, but rather than exclusively them running the league they should be advising students and helping students run the league. It gives students more opportunities to learn and grow as leaders, and keeps the league focused on what matters - students. There’s plenty of details that could be figured out, but my initial thought is having student leadership throughout the league, so student TO’s for each game helping ensure matches go smoothly and helping with any disputes. Student broadcasters and production teams, etc. These positions would not be limited to any one school and should be rotated between schools throughout the seasons, so one school is not “running the entire league”.
For things like scheduling, major rules changes, format changes, etc. it should be put up to a vote of all member schools. So for example if we decide we want to shuffle the conferences/groups so that they are more balanced but no longer match the athletic conferences, we put that up to a vote of all the schools involved.
Lastly, the whole AP Poll system. I don’t quite know how CCS does it, but my thought would be student submitted rankings. If you have enough people submitting rankings, then the whole poll should average out to proper rankings with little bias. I could be completely wrong on that. If you’ve ever seen the r/cfb or r/collegebasketball subreddits, I would want to use a similar format to their polls where they are primarily crowdsourced. Maybe you could go as far as to have a single representative poller from each school, but I think full crowdsourcing is just better. The March Madness style selection show could be done in a similar format, or maybe thats where we bring in representatives. There’s lots of details that can be figured out of course.
As always with new things, any number of things here could change these are just my initial thoughts.
What games?
First and foremost, since this league would be essnetially a copy paste of CCS to other games, we do not do Rocket League. That is 100% there jursidiction and they have obviously done an amazing job running it. If they wish to partner, we could run them in tandem (i.e. CCS people just TO the entire Rocket League division and are in charge of that as a whole).
Outside of that, I would choose the following games (yes I know its a lot)
- Valorant
- Overwatch
- League of Legends
- Smash Bros. Ultimate
These are all chosen based on the currently popular esports as well as collegiate esports.
Other games to consider (maybe in future and not for a first season)
- Deadlock (If the new College Deadlock league goes well, maybe working with them to run it)
- Splatoon
- Apex Legends
- Marvel Rivals
- CS2 (most questionable in my opinion, I’m unsure how much Collegiate scene within Division 1 there is for CS)
In terms of season length and such, I would like to see two seasons a year, one in Fall and one in Spring. Esports is unique in that we don’t have limitations on when/where we can play, and we should 100% take advantage to allow the most competition we can.
Random things I’d want to see
- Each school would be allowed 1 team per game (so this is your TOP team this isn’t a league for EVERY team)
- Reschedules would have slightly softer restrictions. I don’t want to have tons of forfeits because a team couldn’t play on the default day and time, it makes more sense to me for every match to be played even if they all end up in the last week. At the same time, default days and times are generally better for consistency.
- Major rulings are up to a democratic vote. If it affects everyone, everyone should be involved. The only exception would be if something needs to be decided very fast, in which case it would end up being up to the current leadership of the league. They should be encouraged to talk to everyone within their school and others, but they’re the ones who have to make quick decisions if needed. But if possible, a vote should always be required
- Social media involvement from every school, I’ve seen how CCS does on Twitter and I’d love to see that extend to…everything
- Some LAN matches! If two teams want to and have the ability to, I don’t see why they shouldn’t move a match to play it on LAN and make a big promotion stream out of it.
- School streams, let schools freely stream these matches
- No entry fee (but unfortunately also means no prizing). We do this because we want to see esports grow within the collegiate level, especially division 1 and NCAA level. We don’t do this to win money for our school. Just bragging rights. Maybe if schools wanted to donate and put funds together, we could do a trophy or something for the winning programs.
- A potential idea I had (but also probably an annoying one) would be to work with the athletic conferences that already have a league (i.e. BEC, SEC, Big East) and let them handle the scheduling of their teams. This would mirror how NCAA does it for other sports. NCAA doesn’t setup the schedule for the Big 10, Big 10 sets it up. NCAA just sets the general requirements. This may be something more suited to do down the line and not for a first year.
- Rulebooks. We would honestly just copy the major rulebooks from the likes of NECC, NACE, BEC, etc. Everyone knows the rules of their game. You know what is and what isn’t BM or unsportsmanlike conduct, or cheating, or exploiting, etc. The important things to add/change in rulebooks would be around rescheduling and outlining the format. It would also be good to work with the first schools that come in to get an idea of what major things they do or don’t like for their game. For example, for Overwatch I would personally want to see loser map/mode pick.
TLDR: Make a Division 1 Esports league with all the division 1 schools, base it off NCAA conferences, basically copy CCS but for other games. I think it’d be a whole lot of fun. And we all know that pretty much every other league seems to be having issues. The only downside to me is that it adds ANOTHER league to the ecosystem but yknow.
