Thank you for making this thread, at least somebody wants to engage in some real talk about the playoff, instead of just totally mega biased bullshit, most of which goes straight into the toilet. With that said, at least on a philosophical level, if you go with 'better', it would be worse than even the bowls, and the playoff becomes nothing more than a sweaty, violent Roman mob extravaganza, the regular season is entirely irrelevant, every game completely meaningless, utterly devoid of anything at all, and when it's all said and done, W/Ls, SOS, none of it means anything. And the national champion is truly mythical. You just make your own personal choice on who the purportedly best teams are, however you see fit. And when you reduce yourself to that level of savagery, recruiting stars really do matter, because that's essentially the true and sole criteria for inclusion in the playoff, the one bit of reliable substance by which you actually guide your choices. If you want to make a pretense of carefully consideing a team's record and SOS and all that shit, knock yourself out, but the only reason the SEC is the SEC is because of recruiting. And that would become the de facto criteria for all teams by default. But more importantly, there is no criteria, it really is just personal judgement. One's own sense of things, however such sense is arrived at. It is indeed the emperor giving the thumbs up or thumbs down. Essentially the antithesis of winning it on the field.
If you go on putative 'merit', as nebulous as that may be, W/Ls are still the supreme criterion, SOS coming next, and while one's own personal honor and intellectual scruples remain paramount when it comes to the task of deciding something inherently subjective on the basis of comparative merit, so long as that is in enough supply, you could maintain a modicum of dignity and legitimacy in your playoff. And some teams will be disappointed, not everyone will make it in. But you can know in advance that recruiting stars and a preponderance of elite 'talent' will not be a particularly significant criteria. So you'll have to make sure you win enough games, regardless of anything else.
