This is all fair, a couple thoughts in response.
1. What's best for Illinois or any individual team and what's best for the sport as a whole are different things. Illinois absolutely should have done Glen Mason Free Bowl Game scheduling when that was an available option. The fact that if *everybody* did that it would turn the entire September TV slate into garbage is not Illinois' problem, but that is college football's problem, and conference schedule expansion, banning FCS games, and the sheer inflation in buy game fees have chewed away at that scheduling model in a way that ultimately benefits the game as a whole even if it robs a One Weird Trick for doormat programs.
2. A slight distinction but I think an important one, the mission for Illinois football (and basketball and all sports really) is to be better than Iowa and Wisconsin and Northwestern and Purdue and Indiana in the never-ending battle of the competitive pecking order of those sports. And to put up a fight against Michigan and Ohio State, and to attain some sort of national relevance, there are lots of concentric layers to it, kaleidoscope as I said, but fundamentally it's about climbing that ladder and seeing your ancient enemies below you. And that goes beyond just those specific games, it's recruiting, it's your overall record, bowl games, what merchandise is available at the Mag Mile Niketown, it's a full-spectrum thing. Pro sports have one-on-one rivalries like that, but complex, unequal, forced-parity-won't-save-you regional ecosystems like that were unique to college.
Were. The Big Ten no longer exists. I don't care about Maryland, I don't care about Washington, I don't care about a 3 vs 6 game for a CFP bid to be cannon fodder for Georgia, this is meaningless garbage and I hate it. And I talk to enough college football fans IRL to know I'm not alone.
3. The actual proposal here, all of a conference's pre-set CFP bids being determined by Championship Weekend play-ins seeded based on conference record, doesn't weaken or devalue the non-conference. It makes non-conference games formally, structurally meaningless. Literal pre-season. Which is just a mistake, a reflection of a totally haphazard, slapdash plan that they've barely even considered.
And that's the core of it. There was a lot of organic demand for a 4-team playoff for many years. It didn't come from me, I thought it was unwise then and now, but a lot of true college football diehards disagreed, so it goes. Everything that has happened since, both in postseason and conference carousel terms is blind, thoughtless pillage of the sport's riches and legacy by ignorant vandals with the momentary leverage to do so, with not a single thought for the value of the sport and with seething contempt for its fans and its history. It is disgusting white collar crime, nothing more, and by this late date I am running out of patience with the perspective of "hey man, money talks, gotta make way for the new wave". The whole thing is the work of like 10 suits who should be public pariahs getting rotten fruit thrown at them on the street.
