How I would do a 12 team playoff

In my opinion, there are two big problems with college football post-season:
1. Bowls don’t matter, but we want them to because we love the traditions.
2. It is difficult to unobjectively evaluate teams that don’t play one-another and have vastly unequal strengths of schedule. This leads to biased “eye-tests” and popularity contests having an outsized role in who is ranked where.

I think that a playoff system should not replace the bowls but rather embrace traditional matchups. How do you do this? You seed the playoff from the bowl game winners.

Rose Bowl features Big 10 vs PAC 12
Orange Bowl: ACC vs American
Sugar: Big 12 vs SEC
Fiesta: Mountain West vs MAC
Cotton: CUSA vs at large
Peach: Sunbelt vs At large

The playoff is then seeded with the winners of these bowl games. Top 2 ranked conference champs get a bye. Next two rounds are played in the home stadium of the higher ranked team. Championship game is at a rotating neutral site, like the Superbowl.

Granted, this whole structure won’t matter much once the conferences implode in another year or two. That might help us get down to just 8 conferences and cut out a whole round or add a couple more at large teams.