So the MAC and other midmajor leagues have struggled with trying to protect their top seeds in a variety of ways. Remember the sort-lived experiment where the top two seeds got automatic placement into the semifinals? So to keep that from happening but also help the top seeds, what about the NFL model of lowest remaining seed plays the highest remaining seed so if the 12 upsets the 5 say then the 4 wouldn't automatically get benefit of the upset. Unfortunately it wouldn't do anything for "home field advantage" but it might protect the higher seeds a little better and would be really easy to pull off since all of those teams would be at the Q anyway.