It has been much discussed that playing 8 conference games would result in the conference having more teams with fewer losses, increasing conference respect. Additionally, no divisions result in unbalanced schedules and the potential for teams to go undefeated and not even play in their conference championship game.

The easy fix is to take the 16-team league to two divisions of 8 teams and play 7 games vs your division and 1 cross-divisional game. This however results in playing teams in the opposing division rarely, with the potential to play home vs a conference opponent once every sixteen years. Truly, what's the point of being in a conference if you essentially never play?

Four team pods allow you to play your pod (3 games) and two games vs each other pod (6 games), but that remains at 9 games. There are creative solutions to get this down to 8 games, but it gets complicated with which cross-pod matchups you're playing, and it isn't a well-thought-out solution. 

Lastly, with 4 teams tying for 1st in the Big12 this year (with only one head-to-head matchup among the four teams), the idea of conference semi-finals has been floated around, but how do you make this work with the tight schedule between the end of the regular season and the CFP selection? We also don't want our teams to have to play an additional post-season game before the playoffs.

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Enter the Compass Rose, a rotating pod alignment that solves all of these pain points. It is, admittedly a creative and somewhat complicated solution, but I'll talk you through it.

The benefits of this system are numerous:

• Only play 8 conference games
• No team can go undefeated and miss the CCG
• Teams rotate through the other pods rapidly, avoiding long waits between games
• Conference semi-finals are baked directly into the last game of the regular season

For the dedicated, here is a google spreadsheet that goes over it in extreme depth: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTP-tiJjleZw0VMaJeHK3NK7x8-pQ36bt5D3PYXiwAf3nZcAC9x9YfEf6xv4zvE_HNX_h1ayY6as848/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true