Someone mentioned earlier that they should strip the schedule back to 10 games. I don't disagree, but I do not see that ever happening without revenue sharing. What college president in his right mind is going to give up the revenue an extra game brings? Revenue sharing would help, but that's a whole other negotiating table.
But that brings up another question - why exactly does college football need to be limited to 12-14 games per year? In high school, if you play to the state championship game you typically have to go 16 games deep. At the pro level you play 16 games before the playoffs even begin. There can't be some magical reason that players cannot hold up to this rigorous standard, because players younger and much older than them can withstand much more than that. And that other college football division plays about 16 games, regular and post-season combined. So they expect us to believe that D-1 players cannot handle a full 16 game schedule? Hmm, sounds hokey to me.
Ideally we would have a 16 team tournament played out over four weeks (end of December to mid-January. Give every conference champion an automatic bid. Yes, every conference. Even the non-major ones. That's 11 spots, leaving five at-large spots for the "best of the rest" and independents like Notre Dame. Keep something like the BCS to rank the teams and seed them 1-16. First round is played at the highest ranked team's home field, giving a huge advantage to being ranked 1 or 2. Have the final seven games be the BCS bowls (will need to add two more - I nominate Cotton and Sun, as two of the oldest) and rotate them every year.
They'll cry about dropping the bowls, so keep them. There are 100 teams left out, so they can still play the Liberty Staples Coca-Cola.com bowls or whatever throughout, and people will still watch.
