If you can't win your division, let alone your conference, you're *definitionally* not the best team in the nation. Thats already been established. Football is already such a stochastic, probabilistic sport that trying to come up with some platonic objective "best" using any arbitrary collection of stats is worse than meaningless. It all comes down to what the score is when time (or OT) expires- because being the best ALSO and MUST incorporate all of the intangibles of football, INCLUDING THE WEEK BY WEEK LUCK. The best team, whoever that may be, by definition, has had all of those things work in their favor. Now, the other factors can be examined when you have two equal WL records, but the first priority is WINNING. So again, if you can't win your division or conference, you 95% dont belong in the playoffs to begin with, no matter how impressive you've been in any other phase of the game beforehand, because you've failed at the total.