I don’t think it’s that hard to do.
If there’s no reasonable path for the non Power-Five Conference team to make the playoffs, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the Top Division to begin with, otherwise there must be a path for a team outside of the big conferences to control their destiny.
I’ve come up with a system that should accomplish that.
Take the 5 Big conference winners, and then the two best al-large teams, with a stipulation that the best Non-Power Five Conference team automatically qualifies as one of the at-large teams, provided they are ranked in the Top 16, which should pretty much guarantee any Non-Power Five team that goes unbeaten, like UCF, gets a shot.
Seed the teams 1 through 7, the top two seeds get a first round bye.
Have the 6 and 7 seeds play each other, and then a week later the winner of that game plays the 3 seed, and the 4 and 5 seeds play.
Then everything is as it is now, New Years’ day is the semis and the NC game a week later.
So with my system in place it would have been.
1. Clemson
2. OU
3. Georgia
4.Alabama (Qualifies as the best At-Large Team)
5. Ohio State
6. USC
7 UCF (Qualifies as the Best Non-Power 5 Team, ranked at least 16th)
USC and UCF play for the right to play Georgia
Alabama and Ohio State face each other.
Then the winners of those two games play Clemson and OU in the semis.
There will always be disappointments in the formula to calculate the FBS top 25 because there are so many moving parts, but I think the process, if not the formula, is a good one. Maybe the formula can be improved. There certainly are a lot of moving parts and from what I’ve seen, you get 25 people and they have 25 different ways they would do the FBS formula.