Div 1-AA, II, and III teams play 14-15 games a year.
Exactly. If everyone in Division 1A played 11 games, they could easily participate in a 16-team playoff and only 2 teams would play as many as 15 games.
But now that there are 12 regular season games, add in a conference championship game, then a playoff system does seem to push the season out a bit too long.
But now that these conference championship games have been around for a few years, I don't think they'll go away. Right from the beginning when the SEC and Big 12 had their championship games, I felt it was the schools' way of avoiding a playoff.