I already said what I think will happen with this. 20 teams conferences with four, five team divisions. Each team plays the other four in their division and then each division crosses over with one per year.....which makes for nine conference games per year. Means that in a three year span....each team will see every other team in the conference at least once. AND it eliminates the disparity between division teams and crossover difficulty. Not to mention...it sets up four division winners for a tournament to crown the champ. There's money to be made here.
It would be smart for the G5 conferences to move towards this immediately. More games would give more teams a shot to make the 12 team playoffs.
I mean, it's an idea but I think this is short-sighted and has many downsides on top of that.
1. Geography. To make a 20 team conference you're going to be absorbing more geography. For the G5, that means a ton of travel which is a logistical nightmare/cost issue for teams that aren't rolling in the money like the B10, SEC, P12.
2. Viewership. You open up a "market" when you take someone in, sure, but USC fans are not tuning in to watch MD and vice versa unless they're just fans of college football and they are already tuningm into those games and generating you revenue anyway.
3. Unbalanced divisions/conferences. If you're going to try stack this geographically, you're going to have some divisions which are drastically better than others, similar to what we see in the NFL, and will eliminate your opportunity to have 2 heavy weights in a division get into the dance at the end (ie Bama and GA go 12-0 and 11-1, one of them isn't even a division winner, much less a conference winner and that isn't going to be looked on well). Sure it helps a team if they go 14-0 when they're G5, but any time a G5 loses a game it hurts them and an already conflated view of the P5 is going to exist and you're just limiting their opportunities
4. approximately 10-12 of these teams will never have a chance. Some of them are going to be previously have been good. Do they want to sit on the bottom of the conference every single year with no chance to win?
5. Bowl games probably have to go away. If you're going to try play 9 conference games, plus 2 to lead to a CC plus maintain some semblance of non conference to try say your conference is good, you're going to run out of time AND be asking guys to potentially play 12+2+3 games a year if they were to go all the way through. Again this is a scheduling nightmare.
6. More games don't necessarily mean more chances to get in. go look at the rankings as they are. If we're moving to 12, here's how many G5 get in each year
2020: 2
2019: 0 (best G5 teams were (3 of them) 12-1 that year)
2018: 1 (next best team was 11-2)
2017: 1 (next best team was 10-2)
2016: 0 (best team was 13-0, PJs WMU)
2015: 0 (best team was 12-1)
2014: 0 (best team was 11-2)
The CFP committee has shown they don't give a shit about the G5 and their best bet to get in is to play and beat P5 teams. You beat 14 G5 teams, sure you get in but if you lose one it isn't looking awesome and you're definitely out if you lose twice.
There's a reason that leagues have kept conference sizes around where they have. It is harder and harder to control all of those within the conference when the size grows. If the conferences go to 20, I very much see happening what another poster mentioned in that the lower teams will either see all interest in their team die or will fracture off and start a new conference. It makes no sense for the Vandys, Ole Miss's, Arkansas's to get demolished year in and out. Maybe we just should go to the soccer model as it's essentially what you're proposing when the conferences get this large as 10 teams will have nothing to play for halfway through the year
