The italicized part is the point you keep missing. It’s not just two teams. This has been noted repeatedly but you keep just glossing over it.
Oklahoma. Alabama. BYU. Texas. Utah. Miami. Notre Dame.
That’s 7 teams that were essentially vying for 3 spots. On selection day, there wasn’t a hill of beans worth of difference in the resumes of those 7 teams, and everybody knows it. Pick whoever you think is best and whoever you think is worst from the list. Let them play 10 times, and I guaran-damn-tee you that Team A is 4-6, 5-5, or 6-4 against Team B.
If each of those 7 teams all played each other, it’d be 21 total games between them. And yeah, it’d be pretty damn easy to just use the records in those games to sort it out. If, say, each team only played half of the other 6, there’d only be 10 total games. That’d be much more difficult. Still maybe doable, but probably not.
Well, what actually happened? There were only 4 games - total - of head to head matchups from that grouping. BYU-Utah, ND-Miami, Alabama-OU, OU-TX. Therefore, you can’t use head-to-head at all as a viable sorting method. You have to go deeper into SOS, SOR, computer metrics, look at signature wins and bad losses, home/away splits, record in close games, average margin of victory, etc.
Can’t just arbitrarily say 10-2 Oklahoma or 10-3 Alabama is better than 10-2 Miami and 10-2 ND when there was no head-to-head comparison for either, and schedules and results were so drastically different.