This year proves there is no sure-fire formula for making the College Football Playoff

Published Dec. 20, 2016 1:00 p.m. ET

We spent countless hours over the past five weeks slicing and dicing the selection committee rankings. Ultimately, selecting the playoff field was probably a lot simpler than our analysis of it.

They picked the four best teams.

Or more aptly, they picked the four Power 5 teams with the best records.

For the second year in a row, the top four teams — No. 1 Alabama (13-0), No. 2 Clemson (12-1), No. 3 Ohio State (11-1) and No. 4 Washington (12-1) — were the only Power 5 teams to finish with fewer than two losses.

The committee’s first-ever inclusion of a non-champion of a conference (Ohio State) at the expense of a conference champion which beat that team (Penn State) assured there will be far more angst over these selections than in the first two seasons. But listening to committee chairman Kirby Hocutt’s explanation, I don’t believe it was ever much of an argument for them.

“Our mission is to pick the four very best teams in college football,” he said for the umpteenth time Sunday. “Conference championships are one piece.”

The fact that 12-1 ACC champion Clemson passed the 11-1 Buckeyes on the final Sunday but 12-1 Pac-12 champion Washington did not tells you their more difficult decision was between the Huskies and 11-2 Big Ten champion Penn State.

“Had Washington had a stronger strength of schedule,” said Hocutt, “the conversation would not be as difficult.”

Even then, I don’t believe the committee struggled over the two as much as some television analysts did. This was not 12-1 vs. 12-1; it was 12-1 vs. 11-2. The latter would need a pretty compelling case to pass the former — especially given the 12-1 team beat a Top 10 Colorado team by 31 points on Friday night.

“We looked at one-loss Washington — that loss being against a top-10 opponent [USC] — compared to a two-loss Penn State team — one loss they were not competitive in that particular game [a 49-10 loss to Michigan], the other loss was to an 8-4 team [Pittsburgh],” he said.

There was much hand-wringing on the ESPN set over Washington’s atrocious non-conference schedule (Rutgers, Idaho and Portland State.) I don’t disagree with that notion. But the committee had five weeks to penalize the Huskies for those games and did not; they were already in the top four last Tuesday and before beating then-eighth-ranked Colorado 41-10 in the Pac-12 championship game.

As exciting as Penn State’s three-touchdown comeback was against No. 6 Wisconsin on Saturday, it resulted in a far less decisive margin.

There’s a lot of understandable frustration out there right now over what many see as the committee selectively changing its criteria to fit whatever they want their rankings to be. Two years ago, when Ohio State passed TCU and Baylor on the final weekend, the message then-chairman Jeff Long seemed to shout from the rafters was the importance of conference championships.

Now, Penn State fans are being told, actually ... they’re mostly just a peripheral tiebreaker.

Also in 2014, Baylor fans kept hearing over and over again how much their school’s three-cupcake warm-up slate hurt the Bears. Two years later, no such effect on Washington?

Unfortunately, there’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all method for selecting four teams from five power conferences. Each season plays out differently.

Conference championships appeared to carry more weight the first two years because there were no realistic contenders without one. There was no comparable team like 2016 Ohio State, which beat the 10-2 Big 12 champion (Oklahoma) by three touchdowns on the road and suffered its only defeat by three points on the road to an 11-2 team (Penn State).

And Baylor’s non-conference schedule proved so crippling two years ago because all of the Power 5 leagues produced a one-loss champ. There was no 11-2 Penn State. Someone had to be left out.

But because we have short-term memories and we love to overreact to new developments, people are trying to glean what “message” the committee sent with these rankings. Some will say, well, if Penn State didn’t make it then it must be that conference championships no longer matter.

Tell that to 2014 Ohio State and 2015 Michigan State, neither of which would have made it without winning the Big Ten championship game.

Nor does including Washington send a message that non-conference scheduling doesn’t matter and that everybody should just play cupcakes. Nonsense. The single biggest reason Ohio State was able overcome its Penn State loss was the magnitude of that 45-24 win at Oklahoma. If they’d played a MAC team at home instead, they’d have no real argument to beat out Penn State.

If there’s one complaint you might lodge with this committee it’s that they spend a whole lot of time traveling to Dallas to produce something that most of us could have done ourselves. Ranking the teams in order of their number of losses is a tradition that dates all the way back to the first AP poll in 1936.

The season just happened to break in a way that made the committee’s job fairly easy. Again.