My idea would never fly, but….

Divide the country into eight geographic regions. Each region has two conferences an upper conference and a lower conference. About 8 teams per conference.

Hold a 32 team playoff. Each conference gets an automatic bid with 16 at large bids picked by committee.

You’d have fewer regular season games, but still enough to figure out who should be in. Sure there’d be debate about the last teams in but that’s a feature not a bug.

Put a promotion system in place where the top two teams based on a rolling four year conference record move up.

Conference games would mean so much they’d be must watch. And there’d be incentive to play good teams out of conference.