[bigearl]

1 huge hurdle you'll never get past is there are so many teams that a championship becomes very hard to manage.

Idea #1:
Regionals, 4 regions geographically determined to maximize fan travel.
Each region gets a playoff (bowl)
Each region winner then goes to a tournament for champ.
-this will have a huge amount of friction from the big money that puts on the bowls.

Idea #2
Keep things basically as they are, but
6 in conference, 6 ooc games
Instead of careful backroom negotiations on who will play you in OOC, randomize it.
You can still say some team has a weak conference schedule, but then every team would
Those negotiated OOC games are a big part of the problem now IMHO, plus no one would be able to knock anyones OOC schedule- it just is what it is.