After watching all games, my final ranking would be
1 Ohio State
2 Oregon
3 Penn State
4 Texas
5 Notre Dame
Oregon got screwed with the bye and their path. The long idle period for teams on bye obviously hurt them. They all lost and all started their games very slowly. If Oregon did not have a bye, I think they play Ohio State even and maybe win. I feel certain that OSU and Oregon were the top 2 teams this year.
They absolutely must fix the timing next year. That’s more important than the seeding issues. In the current format, I’d rather not have a bye. They need to come up with something.
I was against 16 teams making the playoff. It seems too many. But it may be better to have 16 and no byes. Let your reward for being the 1 or 2 seed be that you get to play the 16 and 15 seed almost as a warm up. That’s better than having to sit idle for 20+ days and play a good team that just played and is ready to go.
They need to play more games at home stadiums. It’s not fair to fans to ask them to make so many road trips. At the very least, they need to make round 2 home games for the teams that had byes.