With all the talk about NIL, Super Leagues, Playoff expansion, SEC secession, and more it is clear that college football is going through a dynamic state of change. What might usually only be an idle "off-season" topic, relegation actually seems to me a reasonable way of meeting the challenges of the moment.

For those not familiar with European soccer leagues, relegation is the process of demoting bottom finishers to a lower league. In the lower league a similar number of top-finishing teams is promoted to the higher league. While this model would never work in US pro sports (no way any current owners would agree to such a change), D1 CFB is the perfect place for it. Right now there are 130 teams playing D1 ball, and let's just say they really should not be in the same league. This unwieldy number could be divided into however many smaller divisions and let the relegation fun begin. 

I would propose a top league of 24 teams with 4, 6-team divisions. These division could be based on existing conferences, but need not be beholden to them. The top 2 from each division advance to an 8-team playoff to determine the champion, and the bottom 4 would be relegated each year. There could be some Bowl tie-in playoff for the bottom two teams in each division. That would leave one middle team from each division, and those 4 could play in some other Bowl. Just using last year's final rankings --and ignoring for the moment regionalism-- would give us something like this:

I get that these are the final rankings, but it gives  reasonable picture as to what a relegation system might produce. It is worth noting that some HUGE programs are absent from this list (USC, Texas, LSU, PSU, ALL the Florida programs) but that would sort itself out in a couple of years. It would also be fun to see how long a team like UC could stick around when these are the teams they'd have to play every week. 

Thoughts?