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College Football needs a Commish.

I was thinking of applying an attendance threshold as to what schools should remain as P5 representatives.

What would be a good number? Start at 50K and go from there? There are some P5 schools with stadiums that offer less capacity than that. 45K maybe?

Much of the SEC and B1G are safe in that zone. The ACC and PAC could be in trouble - particularly the former.

It does create tiers. Medina's proposal is for ratings purposes, to have the 4 Historical Helmets play each other. Each helmet plays the other 3 helmets every year, and all the other schools play two helmets a year. His premise is fans would rather see their team beat a bad helmet, than play a school that is performing well. It would prolly work for a while, and solves the biggest stumbling block to my Performance based Tiers. (What if OSU and UofM are not in the same performance tier.) I counter though does Alabama get excited to embarrass Tennessee year in and year out?

Yes, a BIG part of the logic behind my proposal is to have the four historical helmets play each other every year.  These six games are ratings bonanzas:

• Ohio State vs Michigan
• Ohio State vs Penn State
• Ohio State vs Nebraska
• Michigan vs Penn State
• Michigan vs Nebraska
• Penn State vs Nebraska.  

I know and respect you so I assume this was unintentional, but you slightly misquoted me.  You said that my premise was that "fans would rather see their team beat a bad helmet, than play a school that is performing well."  What I actually said was that a hypothetical Minnesota fan "would MUCH rather watch their team beat a bad Michigan team than a bad Purdue team."  I think this is true for Ohio State fans as well.  I really enjoyed watching the Buckeyes beat up RRod's horrible 3-9 team in 2008.  I enjoyed it a lot more than I enjoyed watching that same Ohio State team beat 4-8 Purdue and 5-7 Illinois.  Purdue and Illinois were theoretically better teams but within a range of a few games it doesn't make much difference.  Within that range I'd much rather beat the bad team with the big helmet than any other bad team.  I assume that most fans, whether or not their own team is a "helmet" would generally agree.  

To your final question as to whether or not Bama fans get excited to embarrass Tennessee year in and year out, I agree with @OrangeAfroMan .  He loved Florida's 10 year run on Tennessee and I'd love every minute of every game if Ohio State had a 20 year run on Michigan.  

In the long-run I think you are right.  If Michigan permanently tanked then I think that eventually younger Ohio State fans would wonder why we played "crappy Michigan" instead of "Helmet MSU" every year.  However, I think that "long-run" is REALLY long.  It is also highly dependent of the age of the fans in question.  Fans like you and me who lived through Cooper's 2-10-1 against The Team Up North will probably never live long enough to get bored with beating the crap out of bad Michigan teams every year.  Younger fans would, understandably, view the situation differently.  

I imagine that it is the same for the Bama fans that you asked about.  My best guess is that 18 year old Bama freshmen who were six the last time Tennessee beat Bama and in diapers the last time Tennessee won in Tuscaloosa probably wonder why on earth their mighty Tide are saddled with "crappy Tennessee" for a rival.  Bama fans your age and mine, on the other hand, remember Tennessee's seven-game winning streak over the Tide from 1995-2001 and Tennessee winning nine of 10 from 1995-2004.  Those older fans, like us, will probably never live long enough to get bored with beating the crap out of bad Tennessee teams every year.  

  

As long as there are fans, there will be some way of monetizing their interest in the games.  It might cease to be advertising and cable subscription fees but the money will still be there for some time to come.  

This.  Entities that haven't even been invented yet will occur between now and college football viewing monies "dry up", to be sure.
Instead of conference channels or Longhorn Network, they may one day be the NCAA football channel group - and even if it costs a lot or a little, all of us and our brethren will gladly pay up.

For my idea, I'm with those who want to go back to 10-team conferences, but I also know it isn't going backward.  16 teams is 2 groups of 8, so in effect, if the conferences agreed to pair off pods, each of them would look like pairs of 8-team conferences under one umbrella.  

As for only having 3 annual opponents, who looks forward to more than that each season?  For Florida, I know we look forward to Tennessee, Georgia, and FSU.  FSU is OOC, so if you had to replaced them, I guess it'd be LSU.  If Gators fans were told we'd only play UTK, UGA, and LSU every year, and everyone else every other year, we'd be really okay with that.  No, most won't end up with 3 sexy teams like that - acutally no one would.  Probably 2 at the most.  But still - it would be orchestrated in a way in which no one is stuck with 3 duds to play every year.  

But back to the caste system - that's pretty much the polar opposite of what I'm advocating for.  If the P5 is comprised of 64 teams or 66 or 80, I don't care, I just want them all to have an equal shot at the national championship.  That means if they win their pod/division/conference, they're in the playoff.  With how it is today, everything is so out of balance, I'm not an advocate for such things.  But if conferences and scheduling and formatting is all uniform, I'm all for it.

Any team winning its 16-team conference would have earned it, 100% of the time.  Once they earn their way into a playoff, from there, they'd earn whatever they win.  Whether its Oregon State or Oklahoma or Ole Miss or Maryland or Iowa - there would be no more "paper" 12-0 teams.....no more backing into a playoff or NCG.  

I think the idea most would be against (especially helmet team peoples) is the equal 6/6 home/away games for EVERYONE, every year.  That would cut out some of the advantages helmets have now - 8-9 home games means major dollars.  Nuh uh.  6/6 for everyone, every year.  

But unless that money is negotiated on a conference basis, why would Maryland have to fly to Nebraska or Minnesota, or why would West Virginia have to navigate Texas recruiting, to get it?

Well for one reason (and also somewhat to play devil's advocate), the conference serves more than one function.  It isn't just a negotiating conglomerate, it also effectively serves as an insurance collective.  
In a theoretical world in which an individual team could easily monetize their fan interest and schedule games without help from a conference, Ohio State would be better off independent from the B1G provided that Ohio State continues to perform at a high level.  Part of the reason that Ohio State would be highly unlikely to consider that split is that the revenue of the other 13 members is a kind of "insurance" for Ohio State.  If Ohio State goes into a major decline and fans lose interest the AD can still count on getting Ohio State's 1/14 share of B1G revenues.  

Sorry Medina, brain fart on my part, did not mean to offend/slight. (I did read it as bad Helmet worth more than, current quality opponent; which is part of my pod proposal.)

My question about the Bama/Tennessee game was about non-Bama/Tennessee fans, does anyone outside of those fan bases care about it? I don't.

Do non-OSU/M*ch fans care about the annual beat down that has been administered? We do because OSU is our team. M*ch does because they want it to stop. Does OAM care if CFP implications are not involved?