No, its an excuse, if you can't get into your conference championship or lose your conference championship - you are not the best team in your conference. You had the opportunity and failed.
This isn't rating, ratings are fuzzy - when you lose on the field that's it.
See, now you're sticking to what's real, and I agree. If you can't get to the conference championship game, or lose that game, you're not the best team
in your conference.
Agreed.
Because that's how we structured it. We decide the conference's best by holding a CG. Win it to be the champ. Simple and straight-forward.
But no one who designed any of those conference CGs intended them to decide what team is the best in the
nation. Ever.
We have the CFP for that.
And the CFP design explicitly recognizes that it is possible Georgia could beat Bama 26-24 with a desperation field goal in the final seconds of the SEC CG after trailing the Tide the whole game.
So Georgia beat Bama. But deep down, where your logic works, you know that those two teams were so closely matched that either of them could've won that game. Bama actually looked like the slightly better team throughout the game, and led for 58 minutes of it. In terms of "who's best," Georgia gets the SEC crown, as they rightfully should, they earned it; but the national championship is still wide open.
And both those teams deserve consideration.
You gonna leave out a 1-loss Bama team, after that brilliant SEC CG, and include instead a 1-loss Washington team that played very few games of consequence all year, and lost one of those? You're saying Bama's close loss to #1 Georgia is more damning than Washington's loss earlier in the season to 7-5 Arizona State? Or that Bama is less deserving than a 1-loss Ohio State team that didn't even play in a conference CG?
You're going to punish a brilliant team for playing a conference CG and almost winning it? Leave them out for a 1-loss Notre Dame that doesn't even belong to a conference, doesn't take that risk?
No. Conference championship games are not play-in games, nor should they be.
Pick the best 4 in the country, and let them play it out for the national title. Even if some of them have one loss (in a CG or elsewhere).