After reading several posts about playoffs and the Big 12's future I thought I'd revisit my ideal playoff plan. First, we would need some more conference consolodation so that there would be four, sixteen team conferences. Each conference would the be broken into 4 pods. The winner of each pod within a conference would play in a conference final four. The conference "semi" final would take place at the best team's home site. You could use tie breakers, head to head, highest ranked etc to deterimine who plays who and where they play. The winner would go to the conference title game. The winners of each of the 4 "super conferences" would go to the College Football 4 team playoff.
Every conference game would really matter for those who think it's so important that college football's season matters. Every team would still want to play a marquis out of conference game to help with seeding in the final four.
This allows, in theory, for 64 teams to have a shot at the national title and in effect gives us a 16 team playoff. Problem solved!