I.e. ESPN wants to sell $X worth of advertising airtime, but X is a product of the number and quality of the games (Ohio State vs Michigan is presumably worth more than Indiana vs Purdue). However, even games like the latter aren't worthless as advertising vehicles. This will probably mean that any future Divison 1-A+ or 1-S or whatever you want to call it for football isn't going to be optimized strictly for competitiveness.

What I mean by that is, right now, as college football is currently structured, there's really only a pool of about 10-15 teams who have any believable shot at competing for a national title at any point between now and the next 5 years. A hyper-competitive league would just take those teams, and every league game they played would be very compelling for the viewer (even the SEC still has clunkers like Alabama-Vanderbilt). But they won't play enough games for ESPN to hit their price target, they need more content than just 6-8 games per week. So they need to add a bunch more teams as filler, basically. Those teams, as of today, will never compete for a league/national title and will mostly never even win their conference title, they'll just have to hope for a winning record each year and maybe score an upset once in a while.

I kept talking about how things currently are, because it would be easy to create a far more well-rounded and competitive league, with more than just 10-15 teams, by instituting a couple simple (but hard-to-swallow for some people) changes. #1, get rid of scholarships, and thus the scholarship limit, which is an imperfect proxy for salary cap, and just pay players directly. No games of "you should come to Texas because we have many fans who love giving lucrative NIL deals to current Texas players, wink wink," programs just negotiate a salary based on their desire/need for a certain player. Let the players form a union (ideal) or have them all be a bunch of individual 1099s (still better than what we currently have). #2, institute program-wide salary cap. Do you want to pay big money for an elite coaching staff and less on the players, or do you spend it all on the players and just get an unremarkable coach? It'd be program's discretion, but it's all against the same cap space. Finally, #3 directly follows, how do you determine the cap for the league? Suppose ESPN says that the right number of teams is 40, maybe it's 4 conferences of 10 teams, whatever. Take that 40th-best program and use them as the benchmark, some kind of rolling average of the last 5 years of what they've spent on football, you can even let debt service payments against the stadium count for it. If you think that indexing the cap against the worst team is way too fair, then have the cap be the median spending (NOT the average) of your entire 40 team league (my guess is this would put it somewhere down in the 25-30 range).

Doing something like this immediately cripples the dynamic of what's been allowed to happen over the years (and has become greatly pronounced over the last 10-20), where the top programs have no limit on what they can spend, which over time increases the functional gap between them and the rest of the teams in their conference, since they naturally accumulate the best coaches, best players, best facilities, etc. The Alabamas and Ohio States would absolutely hate such a system, and scream and howl and cry huge crocodile tears of anguish, which is how you know it would work to create competitive parity.