Instead of 42, I went with 40 teams. 8 Five team Regions and YES there are some teams that are moved, but there are no perfect solutions.... what is so good about 5 team regions some times and 8 team regions some times? There are flaws and will be flaws in every "what if" we do. Here is my lay out.
8 Regions
You play everyone in your Region plus 4 games against another Region, another idea was Region One would play everyone in Region One plus one team from Regions 2, 3 & 4 and you have 3 "choice" games. The kicker, all of the games against 5A teams count toward the playoff bracket (similar to the way the NFL does it). {NOTE: A "CHOICE" game against another 5A team would not count as 5A game in the standings, only the 7 or 8 games scheduled for you count. Every team would play the same amount of "5A" games toward the playoffs.}
Still, top four from each Region (32 make the playoffs)<--- I do not like this, but it seems to be the compromise required and it gives a few more teams another game, let the kids play!
Regions 1 - 4 on one side of the bracket and Regions 5 - 8 on the other side.<---Again, not how I would like to see it, but compromise is required in any negotiation. In NFL, sometimes the two or three best teams are all in the AFC for example...but they still have the AFC - NFC represented so.....
In the sample below, teams are listed in the regions and would be listed by blind draw and let's pretend that is the result.
Team one in Region One plays Team one thru four in Region Three, then their region mates. Week 0 - 2, they can schedule 2 games of their own choice that do not count EVEN IF THEY SCHEDULE TWO MORE 5A TEAMS... one week must be BYE week for a total of 10 regular season games.
