Bama Hawkeye has a great post on the main page, complete with his plan for 9 game conference seasons.  In general, the 9 game conference season is getting a lot of play in the media, including by Rittenberg in this mailbag.

As Rittenberg notes, there are a couple problems with a 9-game conference season:

• Some teams play 5 road conference games, while others get 5 home conference games.
• One more loss for every team in the conference makes it potentially tougher to get at-large BCS bids (and/or for some teams to get to that 6-win bowl eligibility mark)
• When you have 5 conference road games, it may be tough to get to 7 home games in a season, which many teams want to have every year.

Rittenberg also mentions that he thinks it likely that the other current/soon-to-be 12 team conferences (Pac12, SEC, ACC) would also go to 9 games.

So here is my question:

Why not TEN conference games? And specifically, why not 10 conference games, with a 13 game regular season?

Think about it -- the 4 major conferences (and probably others -- you can imagine the Mountain West/Big East/Big 12 maybe voting in favor as well) would have a lot of control over the NCAA, and could convince them to allow 13 regular season (i.e. non-conference championship, non-bowl game) games.  This would in turn allow for a 10-game conference season, and 3 non-conference games.  Get 2-for-1 on the home games (one BCS opponent at home, one FCS team at home, and one road BCS game), and you end up with 7 home games.

This also has the advantage of preventing 6-6 teams from making bowls (you couldn't be 6-6 -- you'd have to be 7-6), and also making a 10-3 team look a bit more attractive for a BCS at-large.  Plus, in terms of your own conference, you'd only miss one conference foe every season, meaning more regular rivalries/better matchups.

Any reason that the major BCS conferences couldn't convince the NCAA to agree to this? Thoughts?