They need to eliminate teams that did not win their conference. Do this and force Notre Dame, etc to join a conference or not be considered. Alabama lost to LSU at home in 2011. LSU was forced to have to beat Alabama twice to win a national championship by the stupid committee back then. Alabama not only did not have to play the extra Conference championship game but were given a chance to win a national championship by beating LSU just one time. How on earth was this fair to LSU? That year, the regular season loss to LSU should have been treated as a playoff game where Alabama lost it’s shot to compete for a championship. Oklahoma State, who won it’s conference should have been given the opportunity to compete with LSU that year.
This season is almost the same scenario except that Georgia is not being asked to defeat Alabama twice to win the championship because they had not met in the regular season. At least both teams had to earn their spot by defeating worthy opponents first.
If two teams played in the regular season, THAT game should knock the loser out of being able to compete with the team who beat them for the national championship and some other team should be allowed to compete for the title. This, or ONLY Conference champions are eligible.
They looked at Ohio State as a conference champion, but they kept seeing the numbers 52 - 14, and could not pull that trigger. Next champion down the rankings was USC at 8, with their loss by 30 to Notre Dame... not quite as bad. It was not a simple take the next one in line.
I proposed this solution.
All the Power Five Conference Champs Quality, with the top two seeds getting a bye.
Then you have the two best at-large teams play the week after the conference championship game to see who the sixth team is.
Then the week before New Years’, the 3 through 6 seeds play to determine the Semi-Finalists to play the 1 and 2 seeds on New Years’.
And I would stipulate that the best non-Power Five conference team qualifies for the at-large game, provided they are ranked in the Top 16 (so UCF would qualify automatically).