If you go to 16-team super conferences, you'd probably get pods.
You play your pod (3 games), plus the next pod (4 games), then you play one team each from the remaining pods (2 games). That gives you a 9-game conference schedule, and allows for at least one regular-season matchup with every other team in the conferences over a 4-year period. You could exchange one of the single-pod games for a set rivalry, and protect some of the traditional matchups to give extra flexibility when creating the pods/divisions, but then it's not a guarantee that you play every other team in the conference at some point over four years.
You could even split the Texas teams into different pods, to both appease the angry A&M fan base, and to make the once-every-four-years Texas matchup a huge thing to look forward to for those fanbases.
Pod 1 (The Old Pod)
1. Texas
2. Oklahoma
3. Missouri
4. Arkansas
Pod 2 (The Power Pod)
1. Bama
2. LSU
3. Auburn
4. A&M
Pod 3 (The South and Eastern Pod)
1. Florida
2. Georgia
3. Ole Miss
4. Miss St
Pod 4 (The Stepchildren Pod)
1. Kentucky
2. Tennessee
3. Vandy
4. South Carolina
Pod 2 is overly strong, and pod 4 would need a historic resurgence from Tennessee to make things interesting, so you could do some flip-flopping, but this makes the most sense in terms of regional games... I think.
I've long liked the pod thing if we expand to 16, which is going to happen sooner or later. I like some of your ideas, but 4 traditional powers in one pod and 4 weaklings in another doesn't work. The SEC Network crew released their idea of how the 4 pods might look and it makes a lot of sense.
Pod 1: Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina
Pod 2: Alabama, Auburn, Tennessee, Vanderbilt
Pod 3: LSU, Texas A&M, Ole Miss, Mississippi State
Pod 4: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri
Very balanced with two traditional powers and two lesser programs in each pod, and teams are grouped regionally also to some extent. Pod 2 with Tennessee actually has 3 traditional powers, but that probably can't be avoided and who knows when Tennessee will ever claw their way back into the big boys' club. In this system I'd like for the SEC to go to a 9 game conference schedule. You play each of the other three teams in your pod, you have one traditional rival from each of the other pods that you play each year, and you play one of the other three teams from each pod every year on a rotating basis, so that every three years you'll play every team in the conference at least once.
