They need to open two slots up during the regular season to have teams in the upper tier play each other, that way every team will be tested against top teams before the playoff selections are made.
How would that work?
To take just one example, but one possibly at the top of this year’s chatterstorm, a lot of people rode the “Indiana didn’t play anyone” bandwagon. It got tiresome. Yes, the Big XX standings got weird this year ... but just for the record, “only dates losers” IU DID play and beat defending national champion Michigan and Washington, which lost to Michigan in last year’s championship game. Would playing last year’s “1 and #2 teams meet your strength of schedule test?
We are not surprised if last year’s champion slips a notch, but I can’t imagine a scheduling committee with the superior Jedi mind powers to anticipate that last year’s top two teams would both fall off the cliff.
Although Michigan maybe didn’t fall that far, since they rebounded to upset Ohio State and then embarrass an Alabama team that was surfing the SEC amen chorus despite losing to Vanderbuilt and not having played a good team outside of the SEC echo chamber. And then there’s Tennessee, which got crushed by Ohio State, the only credible non-SEC team that they faced.
How are you proposing to establish a two game window for quality regular season non-conference games — and do this for every team in the sport — without knowing in advance that Michigan, Washington, and based on regular season records and common opponents, Alabama and Tennessee, were all weaker than Indiana based on scores against common opponents?
If I had that kind of predictive power, I would not offer my services to the NCAA. I would be richer than Elon Musk from my gambling winnings, and the gambling interests would have been bankrupted by now.