You win your conference, you should get a seat at the table, plain and simple. If you are good, you'll compete in the brackets. If you aren't and your conference was weak - you'll get bumped early and fast.
The point of the "playoff" was to get away from the human factor and let the best teams compete. In every other sport, there is a defined and well thought out bracket where teams have the chance to prove they are worthy or not. Except D1 football.
Sometimes the team with the best regular season record isn't the best team when it comes time to put up or shut up. Hell, look at our baseball team for proof - how many times have we gone through the season ranked at or near the top, only to fail in the regionals or supers to a team with a worse record or who wasn't as strong in the regular season? It happens, more often than not.
5 auto for the P5 conferences, 3 spots for the teams that maybe didn't win a conference but were damn good teams and should get a shot. Let the teams play on the field determine the champion, not cherry picking 4 teams with the possibility of a large margin of error and claiming one of them is champion. It's really not that hard, and I simply cannot grasp why D1 football is somehow so different than literally every other single sport.