I can't help but think that a main driver of the idea of a 72 team upper tier in the FBS is that if Notre Dame is to be included that means there are 65 P5 schools that need to have a conference home in the upper tier. That's clearly one too many to simply have 4X16 in the upper tier. I struggle with needing to promote seven G5 schools just to force Notre Dame into giving up its independence kicking and screaming.

To avoid adding 7 schools that we didn't previously think belonged, must we pick a sacrificial lamb to be involuntarily culled from the top tier? What if we could get someone to leave voluntarily, by giving them an offer they can't refuse?

What if the 64 were to make this proposal to Boston College? Rejoin the Big East, bringing that conference to 12 members, and join the AAC for football only bringing them back to 12 (11 for basketball). That should give the Eagles media revenue of about $15 million a year.

In addition to that, each of the 64 upper tier schools would contribute $500K a year from their media revenues to induce BC to accept this deal, giving them $47 million in media revenue, plus BE tournament revenue and AAC bowl revenue. They could never get close to that in the current ACC configuration.

To sweeten the deal further, get Syracuse and Pitt to agree to play them each year in football, and Notre Dame to play them twice every four years (one home, once away).

Now we can carve up the Big 12 rationally to get us to 4X16, which I will do in a separate post, in a way that will make all 16 schools more money even after giving BC their $500K cut.