Byes might help but could also lead to a lot of apathy if teams get eliminated early on. The nice thing about this year is that a ton of teams were still contending for those final playoff spots until deep in the season.
If the purpose is to discourage tanking, I'm still partial to letting higher-seeded teams select their playoff opponents. And if you want to remove schedule bias from the equation so that teams that score a lot (like yours) don't get punished due to a rough schedule, we could always reward the top 7 teams (by record) with a playoff berth and then the 8th spot could go to the team with the most points scored after 13 weeks that has not finished in the Top 7. (You could also do a Top 6 with the top 2 remaining teams by points scored getting spots, etc.)