I could see doing 48 as an option.
- 2 Conferences
- 3 divisions each
Play your division (5), two from the other divisions in your conference (4), one from each division in the other conference (3).
That gives you a 12 game schedule.
Top 2 from each division make the playoffs, plus a wildcard. Top team from each division gets a bye in the first round.
All rounds, save championship game, played on campus. If the bowls still have to have a tie-in, they’ll can prepare to adjust to random locations.
When it comes to basketball, they can have 32 teams from outside the league compete in a winner-take-all, play-in weekend, with the winners making up the final 16 spots to get to a 64-team tournament.
I’m not saying this is what will happen, just saying one way it could if it were at 48.
This does remedy the march-madness situation, lets the lower tier have a shot in BB, and I guess that there could be allowance for the wildcard in FB to be among the lower tier.
And it wouldn’t necessarily have to default to all b1g/sec and then a few individuals to get to 48.
I could see rutgers/maryland/uk/msst maybe getting passed over for an iowa st/okie st, but those would be a rare case.
Also, don’t forget they’ll need some of those weaker teams to eat some losses to pad the dominant teams.