college football playoffs

I have noted previously somewhere, though possibly not here, that the aim in choosing four football teams to participate in a playoff shouldn't be to pick the four teams that are thought best by some consensus, but to choose the four teams that are thought most likely to be the best team; if there are different reasonable ways of analyzing the season, and all of them indicate that a particular team is the third best, I'm not as interested in including that team as a team that some people reasonably argue is sixth and others argue is the best team in the country.

Team, Conf, Record	MAS	SAG	AP	CFP	S&P	total
Clemson ACC 12-1	1	2	1	1	7	3.643
Alabama SEC 11-1	6	1	4	4	2	2.167
Ohio St B10 11-2	4	4	5	5	1	1.9
Georgia SEC 12-1	2	3	3	3	3	1.833
Oklahoma B12 12-1	3	5	2	2	8	1.658
Wisconsin B10 12-1	5	7	6	6	6	0.843
Penn St B10 10-2	7	6	9	9	5	0.732
Auburn SEC 10-3	8	8	7	7	10	0.636
Washington P12 10-2	18	9	12	11	4	0.591
UCF AAC 12-0	10	16	10	12	9	0.457

I have taken here five different rankings — Massey and Sagarin, which are good, solid computer rankings based on the final score and outcome of games, S&P, which uses play-by-play data and sometimes produces very different results than other systems, and AP and the College Football Playoff committee, which aggregate expert human opinions in very different processes — and I have added the multiplicative inverse of each ordinal ranking. Thus Ohio State, which the S&P really likes, is listed above Georgia, which is broadly regarded as about third, because I'm more interested in getting each system's top team and, to a lesser extent, top two teams near the top than getting anybody's third place team near the top.

It's possible that the S&P, as callers to a radio sports show might assert, is just the crazy ramblings of statheads with no real appreciation of football, but shouldn't that — as those same callers might assert — be settled on the field?