is so, so good in England (and other football crazed countries) is that you can literally go out in your backyard, start a team, fund it and move up the ranks of the leagues to compete. You also only compete (for the most part) with teams around your level of competition, meaning you have more competitive games. You also have something to play for most weeks, rather than lose 2 games and your season really doesn't matter anymore. There is ownership in the town the team is from, much like there is ownership in college athletics based on the alumni that go through there. For example, look at what App St. and Liberty have been doing. Trying to move from FCS to FBS, moving conference to conference trying to step up the ladder. The problem is, they'll never make it to the top. They aren't going to be admitted to top conferences at this point, and those are about to be filled to the brim.

To solve this, I'd love to see a 3-tiered, 44 team per tier model for CFB. There are 129 teams in Division I FBS football, so in the last tier, you’d have an imbalance, but I’m not worried about that now. Within each 44-team tier, you have 4, 11 team divisions that play each opponent. Alliances between conferences are made to have 33 or so teams in each division, split amongst the 3 tiers. For example, you have the ACC, AAC and a few leftovers (split a conference) put into one division. This means you keep conference matchups that are decades old intact within the division play. However, you have 2 extra games each season that do NOT count towards relegation to play whomever you’d like. Your 10 interdivison games are what count for division and playoffs. The top 2 teams from each division get into the playoffs, division winners host weighted best record vs worst 2nd place team. The bottom team in each division is relegated while the top teams in the division below are promoted.

Bowls are played with the 32 teams left in the top division and the 4 teams promoted (18 bowl games) and the same CFP structure is kept once the top 8 teams are whittled down to 4. Yes, this means some 4-8 teams will be in bowls, but you have to be in the top division to play a bowl. Bowls can even have their same significance structure by having 3rd place play 4th place cross division, 5 v 6, etc.

The controversial part: the NCAA should divest itself of college football (regulation and all) by selling it (legally?) to an entity that is going to run this whole dog and pony show. March Madness is their bread and butter and where they generate most of their revenue. Football doesn't matter to them financially, and isn't an official NCAA sanctioned championship anyway. This way, every other sport is not affected by this model. Conference can stay how they have been so that other sports still make sense. This won’t happen for a myriad of reasons, but if I was Czar of College Sports for the day, I’d make an non-revocable decree that this happen.