Is it just as simple as renaming the grades?
In which case you could go senior, intermediate, Premier Junior, Junior & Novice
Something like that. I know the 12 team grades have worked ok in Cork (far better than previous system) but it kills things a bit in munster Intermediate and Junior when the winners of 3rd tier and 5th tier have to face Intermediate and Junior champions from other counties. Kerry especially. As said above, if Mallow were in Intermediate and Newmarket in Junior, then they'd have a huge chance of success. It's nobody's fault but down the line this probably needs looking at in terms of the bigger picture?
Been spoken of before in several quarters but a possible structure like:
Senior championship of 16 teams (plus whatever 2 divisions come through round robin to join at quarter final)
Call the next grade Intermediate with 16 teams
Premier Junior with 16 teams
That's 48 teams in your top 3 grades. (There's 52 between top grades now so you'd be dropping 4) Winners of those on a much better footing going in Munster campaigns. At Senior I think there needs to be more than 12 teams in the top tier. If it was thought that there wasn't the strength of club teams to make every group of 4 competitive, then play off divisions/colleges round robin early in year and whichever 2 teams come through go into groups. You could arrange fixtures so that if say, Duhallow come through, Rockchapel, Kanturk, Millstreet, Dromtariffe played on Friday night and Duhallow Sunday. Don't see why that couldn't be done. Or say in Rd1, those teams play on Friday, in Rd2 it's Duhallow (or another division) who have to play on Friday. So you're not throwing a load of just Intermediate and Premier Junior games on Friday. It can be done in a fair manner.
(I'm not going to go into the issue of colleges in Senior championship, but even with all my bias towards my alma mater, unless UCC stop putting out teams full of non-Cork players then it's going to be hard to justify keeping them in the thing. I went to the UCC v Muskerry game this year and my records show 15 of the 19 players UCC used were from outside Cork. That can't continue in my opinion. The techies in fairness have put out some very strong teams largely comprised of Cork lads in recent years.)
Issue at the other end then of course is you're dropping some clubs from current IAFC to Divisions. In case of Adrigole for example, if they drop. They'd play Urhan in Beara JAFC and that's that. So it's a huge disadvantage. Which is why Kevin O'Donovan has raised this issue recently and spoken about all-county Junior league and other solutions.
I think the above and a few other things could lead to a serious improvement in standards and while there are drawbacks, they are totally outweighed in my view by what you would gain. But change comes dropping slow in Cork GAA as most here know!
