Before the Pac-12's collapse was started by UCLA and USC, I proposed a similar scheduling rubric for them in football.
The 7-game conference schedule here would have been accomplished by having each team play its pod rivals every year, and one school from each other geographic pair on a four-year schedule, such that each inter-pod game would have occurred twice in a four-year period (once hosted by each team).
This is another example of how YOU are looking for Optimization for league configuration based on things like competitive fairness, symmetry, organization and having everything "make sense."
But the reality is, the conferences DGAF about that stuff; playing more conference games means there's a much larger TV audience on their network for "Game 5" of the 12-game season in which the first FOUR are non-conference and last EIGHT are conference.
Because the Pac-12 or P5 schools are bigger than the G5 schools you'd schedule OOC, and therefore have more fans.
USC vs Eastern Washington (OOC); or USC vs Washington (Conf). USC is the same audience (maybe lower than a Pac-12 game because everyone assumes USC will trounce EWU so why tune in?). UW has at least 4x the fans that EWU has.
Your logic and reasoning for why you want to see what you want to see is great, it's just highly unrealistic because the schools/teams don't share your motivations. Their motivations are dollars, not good structure, order and reason.
Why would the conferences decrease the amount of conference games while adding schools? That honestly seems Pejorative Slured. The Big Ten will not decrease from 9 and honestly both the SEC, Big 12, and ACC should also play 9 conference games a year as well. But I guess you want every school to play more FCS schools?
There's A LOT of sanity to playing LESS conference games. This is one of those "counter-intuitive" things, and it really shows itself more in BASKETBALL than football, because of how razor-thin the margins are for basketball teams.
The old rating system of basketball teams (RPI) is based on Win Pct, SOS and opponents SOS, which sounds like "Win games, beat good teams, your number is higher"
That's true if everyone is independent. But the effect conference play has is much larger, because everyone plays 60-75% of their games as conference games.
Every conference WILL go .500 against itself and what the conference does COMBINED OOC is basically what decides what the SOS from conference games is. The more conference games you play, the closer it moves to .500. The Big Boys put up such a huge OOC SOS that the tiny little creep towards .500 is still well above .500 or .600.
The "mid-major" conferences can't compete with that because they don't have 12-16 members all going 9-1 or 8-2 in conference play; so their conference games have less math value each in SOS, and are "weaker."
But one way to "Combat that" is to play LESS CONFERENCE GAMES, so if you win 65% of your OOC games instead of 75% like the Power conference, your Conference Game SOS number creeps from .650 toward .500 less times than power conferences.
Big Ten is 80% OOC win pct, the average Big Ten conference game is 18-12 (.600) on the SOS (20 times).
The A-10 is 65% OOC win pct, the average A-10 team is 17-13 (.556) on the SOS (18 times).
But if the A-10 switches from 18-games to 14-games, there's 4 games each (60 games total) where instead of A-10 going 30-30 against each other, they're going 39-21 against non-conference teams.
Now the average A-10 teams is 17.4 wins vs 12.6 losses (.580 on the SOS).
The reason conferences don't do that is because when selling their TV product, the networks can't guarantee that the extra OOC games are going to be BETTER GAMES than Dayton vs VCU a second time.
But if the goal is to manipulate the math to get NCAA bids, less conference play is smarter.
