The Tailteann Cup is a loser’s competition, no matter how it’s dressed up.
Once you have that, then you’re up against it in terms of it taking off.
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You are correct. For this to be taken seriously it needs to be a counties sole target for the year.
The provencies are finished, but could perhaps be retained as stand alone competitions.
Divisions 3 & 4 at the start of year are the teams contesting the Tailteann cup, 1 & 2 contest the Sam Maguire. League position determines the draw for the 1st round, e.g. top of Div 1 plays bottom of Div 2, etc.
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100%
It’s not. We need the same system as the clubs & ladies intercounty, Senior, Intermediate & Junior.
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We do, but they were never going to get that passed straight out of the gate.
Westmeaths to lose. Chalk it down
Which requires the abolition of the provinces.
Which makes the provinces the McKenna Cup.
If you want to have a league as championship format, the only way you can do it is have the old Division 1A/1B/2A/2B format.
Seven teams qualify for the All-Ireland quarter-finals from 1A/1B.
The winners of 2A and 2B play-off against each other for the remaining place in the quarter-finals, which doubles as the Division 2 final, which you can hand out a silly trophy for.
What do you need a league for? Just incorporate into the championship ffs. Scrap provisionals. 8 groups of 4 by region. You play against the other 3 in your group, 3 from your wider region and 3 from the other (southern/northern) region. That’s 9 guaranteed games against teams from all over. Top 2 in each group through to straight knockouts.
Flaffing about with a league in winter months to give you placings in two different competitions and the lesser one messing around with regions and prelims and all sorts.
@farmerinthecity would be delighted with an NFC group of Leitrim, Sligo, Donegal and Derry.
And yeah, I’m referring to the NFL system 
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Why can’t we go junior, intermediate, senior like every county club championship in the country?
Not all teams trying senior, losing and falling into the other two.
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Because it would be shit?
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I can only speak for Leitrim but the intermediate and junior finals would attract decent interest.
Shit eh? What do you call the situation at the moment?
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That’s what I proposed in the past, the provencies either become a pre-league or post league tournament ala the McGrath, McKeanna etc.
The main tenet of Farmers point is correct, it wont get much traction as a losers comp.
So every single other GAA competition in the country is shit? The Senior football championship, the only non graded GAA competition I know of isn’t?
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Splitting it in 2 is plenty. There’s no need for 3 grades.
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Bringing in an off the shelf format would be shit.
The All-Ireland football championship has 130 years of history.
The notion that you can suddenly make it a three tier competition and everything will suddenly be hunky dory is deeply simplistic.
If you make the football championship three tier, you reduce the amount of proper knockout games to three, which isn’t very clever.
The 2001-2017 format is still the best in my view and the problems with the inter-county game have more to do with the league format and other structural imbalances than the championship one.
Might be worth considering just doing away with out of season training, and then bringing back all intercounty meet ups to once, maybe twice a week, including matches.
I don’t disagree with a lot of that. I was only thinking to myself last week how the period with the back door and knock out quarters was the best in memory for football.
2010, when all four qualifiers got through to the semis was particularly memorable.
And there are other issues at play than the structure of the Championship.
But I honestly don’t know what purpose the Provincials serve. For instance in Connacht, there are seven teams, only six previously and it gets very tiresome to be drawn out against the same team. And what is becoming really apparent now is the gap between top level teams and lower level teams which is impacting participation in the lower level counties give the now crazy level of physical fitness required to be even able to finish a match.
Like the losers groups in county championships of old the way to maintain interest in it would be to allow the winner back into a he main championship at q/f stage.
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And at least Connacht is somewhat competitive. The two southern provinces have been largely cakewalks for the last decade, bar one or two aberrations.
The league is actually a more entertaining competition in football. The struggle is incorporating the big knockout paydays in Croker into that format.