As far as that scenario goes, Ohio State isn't punished for the timing of their loss, because the polls don't matter.
But they are punished for the timing of their loss. More specifically, they are punished because their loss occurred in conference, rather than out of conference.
No, they're punished because they lost in the conference championship game. They could have lost at any point in their conference season, just not in the conference championship game.
You might as well argue that a playoff system would be unfair because teams are punished for the timing of their loss. I mean, if 12-1 Nebraska lost to 8-4 Virginia Tech in the playoffs, then is Nebraska being punished for the timing of their loss? What about an undefeated team losing to a one loss team in the national title game? Now they both have one loss, isn't the loser simply being punished because of the "timing" of their loss? Or is it that the game that they lost had that much more weight attached to it?
Futhermore, you're trying to argue in favor of a poll based system, where teams
are punished for the timing of their loss way more brutally than in a system where conference champions are rewarded playoff berths. In your system, a team can lose any game at all towards the end of the season, and they'll drop out of contention as a result, while a team that lost early in the season moves ahead of them. In my scenario, teams have to win their division, and they can do that no matter when they lose during their conference schedule. Teams in my scenario would actually be punished less for timing than in yours.
You can argue that the OOC schedule is made less relevant by a playoff system which rewards conference champions alone. But the OOC schedule in college football has already been ruined by the longer conference season and championship game, forcing most powerhouses to schedule cupcakes throughout the OOC in order to gain revenue and schedule wins. A playoff may help alleviate these trends by rewarding teams and conferences with extra revenue, and by placing less emphasis on early season losses.
I'm all for better OOC games, but then we get to a scenario where it makes a LOT of sense - if there are X conferences - for X number of dominant teams to jockey for position into each of the top conferences. And conferences will realign such that each conference is dominated by a couple teams, and then filled with creampuffs. Diluting the SEC, Big 12, Pac 10, into the other conferences, pretty much the opposite from now where the best teams in the small conferences are moving up the ladder. Or maybe combine everything into a couple of superconferences with the powers split between them. That's kind of a more messed up scenario than what we currently have, in my opinion. Way too much trouble for the sake of the national championship question.
Your idea of how and why conferences exist is also faulty. Conferences wouldn't become diluted because of a playoff system placing more emphasis on winning conference championships. It would create less incentive for teams like Boise State and TCU to move into tougher conferences, but it would not lead teams like Nebraska toward weaker conferences so they could compete for playoff berths. That ignores the main reason conferences exist at all: Money. Super-conferences aren't going to be the
product of a playoff system, they're going to be the
cause of a playoff system. They're going to be the product of people wanting to make more money.
The NCAA can't force them to join a conference though. They shouldn't be able to. A school should be able to be unaffiliated if they feel it's in their best interests, rather than find a conference to attach to or be unable to play in the championship game. Notre Dame is down now, but they are the big reason in reality why it can't happen.
The NCAA can't force a team to join a conference, but they can set standards for playoff berths, and if only conference champions are allowed in, then they are pretty clearly incentivizing independents to join conferences. That's no different than it is now, since the BCS emphasizes conference play over independents, and even favors certain conferences (AQ) over others. Like I said before, it wouldn't be hard to host a play-in (a de facto conference championship game) for the 2 most highly rated indpendents, or to find some other reasonable solution to that problem.
Let's say instead of the top four teams by polls, we say this. Undefeated teams - regardless of conference, ranking, whatever - are first in. From then on, any H2H records, teams that have the highest winning percentage, or # of wins, and some other series of factors, decide the tiebreakers in some convoluted order. Kind of like each conference must use some system of tiebreakers to decide its division winners, but applied on a much larger scale. Or, #1 and #2 are automatically in, and #3 and #4 are determined by tiebreakers.
Your tiebreaker system would never work either. First of all, what if TCU, Boise State, UConn, and Ohio State all go undefeated? Then you have 3 weak-conference teams with Ohio State, and one-loss teams like Alabama have the same argument that they do with the BCS, that they're more deserving than an undefeated Boise State. Say you have 3 undefeated teams, and then you have 3 one loss teams from separate conferences who didn't play each other. They have the same # of wins/losses (and winning percentage), no head to head record to discuss, so what are you going to go on? Strength of schedule? Common opponents? You're just creating an even worse version of the BCS.
