Saying a 12-0 Notre Dame didn't deserve to be in the playoffs is just crazy revisionist history. OU and Ohio State (and Georgia for that matter) had plenty of warts as well.
It's not revisionist history at all if the criteria is putting in the four best teams regardless of record. That's the criteria for the CFP. And Notre Dame doesn't qualify.
The people who are charged with putting the playoff together are supposed to be good enough at their jobs that they can evaluate beyond the W-L record. Notre Dame's two best wins were probably at Syracuse and at Northwestern. So then you go back and actually look at the tapes of those games and judge athleticism, comparatively. The Irish's next two best wins were home wins against Michigan (which has later proved to be overrated in its own right and very slow) and Vanderbilt. How did Notre Dame actually
look? The biggest problem the committee was supposed to fix was not having eyes on games. When I watched the ESPN coach feed from Clemson-Notre Dame and they got to the part where the four coaches were asked to pick the UA-OU winner in the second game, only two of the coaches had seen both teams play at all this year. A big part of the reason the CFP was formed was because everyone knew the coaches who vote in the Coaches' Poll weren't actually watching games outside their region.
Ohio State and Georgia both deserved to be in ahead of Notre Dame. If Oklahoma's defense got a pass, there's no justification for keeping Ohio State out for the same complaint. OSU's games against common opponents it had with Notre Dame ended up with more dominating victories for the Buckeyes. OSU handled Northwestern and Michigan far better than ND did. The entire argument against Ohio State came down to the Purdue game, not just that it was a loss, but that it was also a blowout. The circumstances surrounding that game were completely overlooked for one reason or another.
When selecting teams for a playoff, since there are no "auto-in" scenarios, a subjective look at the talent level and other things that make a team "a team" have to be considered. Also to be considered are which teams are going to be able to give the top two seeds a good game. Bad matchups should be avoided. Add all that up, and Notre Dame was no better than sixth this year in a field that lacked a lot of difference-makers at the top of the list.
But the whole non-conferenced situation with Notre Dame is untenable. The Irish get to pick how and where to schedule games, they don't have a conference championship game to deal with and they don't have to worry about the input of a conference in regards to how they run their program. They've always approached this advantage with noses turned up and a "but we're
Notre Dame" attitude, and it's got to stop. The conferences, all five of them, have to have the guts to stand up to the Notre Dame program going forward and tell them that they can choose either autonomy or competing for titles, but they can't choose both at the same time.