On Automatic bids and conference championship games.

In this post, I want to explain why automatic bids for conference champions make sense for a playoff and why football conference championship games no longer continue. I've touched on these things in other posts but I think it merits a lengthier explanation.
Automatic bids:

For me, the 2014-15 college football season is a good example of why automatic bids for conference champions make sense.
Coming into bowl season, the top 6 teams in the country(according to the playoff commitee's rankings) were (in order from 1 to 6): Alabama, Oregon, Florida St, Ohio State, Baylor and TCU. All of these teams had at least 1 loss(other than unbeaten Florida State). Only 4 of these teams were to be given a chance at the championship due to to  currently flawed system. Baylor and TCU were the teams left out. When the playoff matchups were announced, I was confident that Alabama would dominate Ohio State and that Oregon would do the same to Oregon. But before the playoffs even started, something interesting happened. TCU played their bowl game against Mississippi, a team that had beaten Alabama and top 10 Mississippi State. TCU won the game convincingly 42-3. It seemed entirely possible that TCU could have been the best team in the country but didn't even have a chance to win the championship because of 1 loss on the road against a top 10 team. Yet, Alabama, Oregon and Ohio State got in with worse losses. Nonetheless, Oregon destroyed a previously unbeaten but overrated Florida State team. But the Ohio State-Alabama game produced what seemed to be a shocker. Ohio State outplayed Alabama thoroughly and managed to win the game. But was it really an upset? It seemed that Alabama was the country's best team, but was that just a narrative given by the media(known for it's SEC bias)? After all, the media has a huge influence on public opinion. Though there's still a title game to be played, are all the questions answered?Who really is the best team in the country, truly deserving of the national title? Is it Ohio State, who ultimately was the title game winner? Or is it TCU? It seems that every year this question could be legitimately asked at the end of many if not most college football seasons and even the current playoff system hasn't changed that.
Now you are probably wondering what this has to do with automatic bids. But allow me to ask you this question: Who is the best team in the Pac-12? That's easy: Oregon. Who is the best team in the Big Ten: Ohio State. SEC? Alabama. Sun Belt? Georgia Southern. America's Conference? Marshall. Etc. Etc. Even when the answer less clear like the B12(TCU or Baylor) or the AAC(Memphis or UCF). There are clear tiebreakers(ie. Baylor beat TCU and UCF lost to 2-10 UCONN vs Memphis losing to bowl bound Houston, edge to Memphis). The best tiebreakers are usually 1. Head to head 2. Worst loss 3. +/- (It's pretty much PointsFor minus PointsAgainst) . The point is that is almost always much easier to effectively determine who's the best team in a conference versus who are the best 4(or 8) teams in the country.
But why is that? It's because teams play more conference games(8 or 9 of them) than non-conference games(3 or 4 of them). And most of the best teams in the country play insignificant games in the non-conference. Most non-conference schedules are soft. The best teams in the country rarely play against each other in the non-conference portion of the schedule. So how do we determine which teams are the best in the entire country? Mostly on a lot of assumptions, which may or may not be true. But after 8(or 9) conference games, the picture of who is the best team in a particular conference is very clear. And it is based on the games that are actually played, not assumptions or biases.
That is why the automatic bids for each conference champion make sense, it leaves less room for error vs basing things on the national picture. Media analysts and "experts"(including the college football selection committee) act like the national picture if always obvious but it's usually  it's very unclear. If the national picture was as clear as some think it is, the committee would have let TCU in the playoff in place of Alabama. But instead, they had Alabama as the best team in the country and seemed justified in doing so. If one of my college football playoff plans(either the main one or the alternate) were in place, Alabama would be in as the SEC champion and TCU would certainly have gotten an at-large bid. Teams would be able to prove themselves on the field in meaningful games.

Conference championship games
If college football playoffs are to be expanded, conference championship games should be dropped. Automatic bids into the playoff for conference champs would already make up for any financial reason to keep the champs games(playoffs will be lucrative). Regardless, conference championship games are usually unnecessary. They're based on splitting up conferences into divisions and giving the division title winners a game to win the conference championship. It's usually pointless as it's almost always clear who is the best team in the conference is and this is usually an extra game for a fluke result to lead to an undeserving conference champion(like an 8-4(5-3) team beating an 11-1(8-0) team to get the crown). It makes no sense, after playing 8 or even 9 conference games in a 14 team conference, that the conference title is determined by 1 extra game, often when it's clear which team is better/more deserving. Sure there are examples when there are evenly matched conference championship games (two 11-1(7-1) teams matchup for an exciting game), but those aren't common enough. I'd rather solve it with the aforementioned tiebreaker.