top 10 basketball school and bottom-tier one. Their equivalent would be a top 100 team, and those upsets happen all of the time, much more often than a NIU over Notre Dame.

The equivalent of the bottom tiers of Division I basketball are bottom-feeding FCS teams like The Citadel, Wagner and Youngstown State that routinely play FBS teams in body bag games and almost never win, period, let alone against blue bloods that aren't having historically bad years.

As for what you want, you're not going to get "a playoff" on the terms you want with a 150-team "league." Even March Madness is an invitational tournament, not a real playoff. But the marginal cost of adding extra teams is trivial enough in basketball, especially with play-in games, that they can afford to waste slots on giving weak conference champions auto-bids. And if they add chaos, all the better. It's great for what it is, but it's not replicable in FBS football, where you can't have that many rounds. You'd basically be introducing body bag games into postseason college football, and who wants to see that?

The FCS has been staging a "real playoff" for years, and no one cares to watch it. College Baseball has a great world series that no one watches. The only comparable event is March Madness, and its magic, for reasons stated above, can't be exported to college football.