Agreed, the whole seeding thing was just sort of weird from the start. Getting a first round bye was not, at least in principle, that was at least arguable. That there's some reward for winning your conference. But if that's the price you're going to pay, an absurdly premature matchup of the two best teams in the country in only the 2nd round, or you might even say the 2nd part of the 1st round, then you might need to reconsider it.
I don't know if FIFA is a good model to follow, don't they do like a lottery, and they just draw names out of a hat? Yeah, it's weighted, so you don't get Brazil, Germany, England and Italy in the same group. And you actually could get all those teams in the same group, depending on where they finished in their qualifying groups. If I understand correctly, maybe I don't. But it's pretty easy to seed 12 games in a tolerably competitive fashion. Super easy in fact. The tricky part is the first round bye, and if you think that should be reserved for conference champs. And maybe you could re-seed them after the first weekend is in the books.
