4 Pods - play your own pod (2 games) and 2 of the 3 other pods (6 games) every year with the 'missed' pod rotating each year.

Then for the 9th conference game, each pod is ranked 1-3 and matched up against the same rank in the 'missed' pot.

Using pre-CCG CFP rankings for last year (or sagarin when teams are too low), this would have been

West: BYU (#12 CFP), Texas Tech (#42 Sagarin), TCU (#70 Sagarin)
South: Baylor (#9 CFP), Houston (#21 CFP), UCF (#54 Sagarin)
Central: Oklahoma St (#5 CFP), Kansas St (#27 Sagarin), Kansas (#136 Sagarin)
East: Cincy (#4 CFP), Iowa St (#14 Sagarin), West Virginia (#49 Sagarin)

and resulted in final week matchups of

#12 BYU vs #4 Cincy
#9 Baylor vs #5 Oklahoma St

#42* Texas Tech vs #14* Iowa St
#21 Houston vs #27* Kansas St

#70* TCU vs #49* West Virginia
#54* UCF vs #136* Kansas

with the two winners of the #1 matchups going into the CCG.  But that would be some serious marquee matchups there with high stakes and would get great viewership and would help prevent teams from dropping late (committee doesn't tend to ding teams much for losses to top teams) and ensure the conference champ had an amazing resume.

As a side note, it would also help those lower-rated teams (TCU, West Virginia, UCF) that are struggling for bowl-eligibility to get a real shot at another win.

_______________________________________________________

I've also thought about the following configuration, since it might be a bit better geographically and I like keeping Baylor/TCU/Houston together and like keeping Iowa St/K-State/Kansas together.

I lean now towards the first picture though since it balances the top teams better and ensures that every team will have at least one game in Texas every year (since they'd always match up against either the West or South pod, which each have 2 Texas teams, so one home and one away.  Either way would work though and this version has you playing in Texas still 11 out of every 12 years, so not a huge issue here.  Plus the conference championship would likely be in Dallas.