the NFL has a small number of teams in which the talent level is driven to a mean by the NFL draft and a salary cap. This means that the variations in talent between the best and worst teams on any NFL squad's schedule is much, much smaller than for a college team's schedule. The easiest schedule in the NFL also is a lot closer to the most difficult NFL schedule when compared to college schedules – even within the P5. Further, within an NFL division, each team gets a home/away with every other division member. Lastly, NFL teams cannot pick and choose their opponents. The NFL is therefore perfectly adapted to a system in which division champs earn playoff berths.

College football has too many fundamental differences with the NFL for a champions-only formula to make sense (for now).
1. OOC games: in the NFL, every game counts toward playoff eligibility, and head-to-head is a tiebreaker. Notably, within a division, each team gets a home/away to possibly nullify a single away game loss (see PSU/OSU). If college ball goes to a conference champ-only formula, 25% of most schools’ schedules would not factor into playoff consideration. Seems crazy to me.
2. Scheduling home/away: Michigan cannot control (at least not openly) it’s B1G schedule, but it can schedule three home OOC games so that it plays a total of FOUR away games. That kind of chicanery makes it easier to win your conference, and it almost worked for Michigan. If schools have scheduling flexibility to make their conference championship road easier, then a championship trophy cannot equal an auto-bid to the CFP.
3. Scheduling difficulty: if PSU were to get the playoff bid over OSU, OSU essentially gets no credit for beating B12 champ Oklahoma. PSU scheduled an ostensibly weaker Pitt OOC and lost, and in the conference champ-only model PSU’s loss and OSU’s big OOC win mean nothing. I can’t accept that. To me, the head-to-head win by PSU is more compelling than PSU winning the B1G, but still not enough.
4. Other conferences: the CFP will never be truly about finding the ‘best teams’, but it is closer to that than anything else. If strength of schedule didn’t matter then WMU should be in the playoff, but we all agree that SOS (and actually winning) matters. Even conference champ-only purists use SOS to disquality certain conference champs from CFP eligibility, but somehow will not disqualify a P5 conference champ on the same grounds.

It is very frustrating to hear folks say ‘they won their conference so they deserver a berth’. That is when I ask ‘what does it mean to win a conference championship?’ Winning your conference means that somebody removed a big chunk of the games on your schedule, and evaluated your eligibility for a conference championship game based on only a portion of your year. If Florida had pulled off a miracle upset of Alabama nobody would be making an argument for UF in a playoff.
[Post edited by lawhokie at 12/04/2016 11:27AM]