re: Give Your take/Opinion/Thoughts on what you think college football needs to do -Playoffs

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Can you design a CFB playoff that doesn't use any form of opinion poll?

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Yeah, you just use an even number of conferences and seed all the conference champs in the playoffs. Then, you have the conferences matched up against each other rather than seed the teams based on record for the first round.

Right now there are 10 conferences. PAC 12, SEC, ACC, Big 10, Big 12, American, Sun Belt, CUSA, Mountain West, and the MAC. It appears that CUSA is about to fold, leaving 9. What I would do is demote back to FCS enough teams to get everything down to 8 conferences, and force all indies to join a conference, seed those 8 conference champs in a tournament, and the playoff would basically be taking what used to be the traditional BCS bowl game matchups and simply adding games after. You could essentially re-seed the teams after the first round or have the bracket pre-determined not by polls, but by conference affiliation (i.e. the Big 12 always plays the SEC in the Sugar, the Pac 12 always plays the Big 10 in the Rose, etc.

Even if you assume 10 conferences, you can have essentially a play-in tournament for the G5 conference champs with 4 conference champs competing for 2 spots.

How would that have played out last year?
Your conference champs were:
MAC: Northern Illinois
CUSA: UTSA
Sunbelt: ULL
Mountain West: Utah St
American: Cincinnati
Big 12: Baylor
Big 10: Michigan
PAC 12: Utah
ACC: Pitt
SEC: Alabama

So, after Championship Week, the MAC champ Northern Illinois would have played the Sunbelt Champ ULL. The Mountain West Champ Utah St, would have played UTSA.

The winners of those games play in the Fiesta bowl on New Years Day.

On New Years:
The Orange Bowl would feature the ACC Champ Pitt taking on the American Champ Cincinnati.

The Sugar Bowl has the Big 12 Champ Baylor vs the SEC Champ Alabama.

The Rose Bowl has the Pac 12 Champ Utah verses the Big 10 Champ Michigan.

The Fiesta Bowl has the winners of the play-in. Let’s assume Utah St verses ULL.

The next round could be where the Peach features the winner of the Orange verses the Sugar; and the Cotton which has the winner of the Rose verses the winner of the Fiesta, and finally, a championship game.

This system would add games, but if you eliminate the FCS game from the regular season, only a G5 team reaching the title game would play an additional game to what a playoff champ plays now. This would inevitably change some outcomes as mulligans of conference championship games (Alabama vs Georgia) or conference regular season games (Alabama vs LSU) wouldn’t be possible. In addition, Notre Dame would have to join a conference to have a path.

What this essentially creates is a 20 team playoff decided by conference standings, which are mathematical and in no way based on human polls. Every team in a conference starts out with a realistic chance at a title. Teams are eliminated on the field of play rather than public opinion, and teams in weaker conferences have to play more games to make it to the semis.

The biggest flaw in this system, imo, is that it makes OOC games irrelevant, something which will need tweaking, or else the first few games of the year will be essentially treated like pre-season games.