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The committee just needs to be silent until the CCG's are over.

then they wouldn't appear to be assclowns

All ESPN cares about is TV ratings. Whether it's true or not, they believe driving controversy... errr... "conversation"... on a weekly basis, helps them increase TV ratings, both weekly and at the end of the year.  I don't know whether or not it really helps, but it probably does, and that's their sole focus.

and this is also the only logical reason for the cfp committee to say that 5-8 were so close and then ultimately reverse on that stance when it came to final rankings. otherwise, it makes 0 sense.

and this is also the only logical reason for the cfp committee to say that 5-8 were so close and then ultimately reverse on that stance when it came to final rankings. otherwise, it makes 0 sense.

At least with the polls (human or computer) you could see the total number of votes/points/etc, so you actually had a mathematical sense of how the voters or computers were setting gaps between teams. 
Right now if you look at the top 25 polls for either AP or Coaches you see that Clemson/OU have a narrow gap between them at the top, a moderate drop to UGA, another slightly more substantial drop to Bama/OSU which are nearly tied, and then a pretty large gap to Wisconsin. If you go back to week 14, Bama/UGA at 5/6 were extremely close together, and then it was a BIG drop to Miami/OSU at 7/8 who were nearly tied (and were exactly tied at 7 in the coaches poll). 
So the committee gives us "5-8 are extremely close" which I don't know whether it's true or if they just wanted to give the appearance that any one of those teams might get in to drive up CCG ratings. 

I think an added difficulty this season is that there aren't any teams that pass the eye test for, "wow, that team is amazing." Whether correct or not, in many years we see teams that just look that much better than everyone else, so top four is ok, because we know that the right one or two teams is in there. This year I think there's little separating the top...ten(?) teams. So if you're looking for the obviously best choices to play in a single-elimination format, it's less obvious who those are. It's not totally unlike that LSU championship way back in whenever when LSU sort of fell into the championship game because other teams kept losing.

Clemson seemed like an obvious choice (but not a truly dominant team--it lost to Syracuse, and not 1996 Donovan McNabb Syracuse, but 4-8 2017 Syracuse). Did any of the others? Trying to get rid of duds or question marks on this slate is basically impossible. Georgia got waxed by Auburn, and barely got by a good, but not great, Notre Dame. Otherwise who did Georgia beat in an uncharacteristically weak SEC? Alabama played a schedule as weak as Wisconsin's, and wasn't especially competitive in its loss. Oklahoma lost at home to a slightly above average Iowa State. Ohio State had two losses, including a head scratching beating at the hands of mediocre Iowa. Wisconsin played a schedule as weak as Alabama's, but hasn't won three national titles in the last few years, and lost to Ohio State when it mattered (and as much as I loved this season for Wisconsin, I feel like the Badgers played to their ceiling; could they have beaten Ohio State on a better day--and worse day for OSU--? Absolutely, but I wasn't surprised that they didn't). USC, the PAC-10 Champs? Notre Dame destroyed them (and they lost to a decent, but completely unhelmety and otherwise Iowa-y Wazzu). Penn State would have had an argument if it had kept to its loss to Ohio State, but the loss at MSU really took the shine off. MSU was probably pretty good, but coming off the year it had last season, the uncompetitive loss to ND, and a week after losing to unhelmety Northwestern, that was going to leave a mark.

This was an unusually parity-ish season, I think, with no one really standing out and making discerning the proper four teams harder than usual.

So while I think I would go for an eight-team playoff, which would have been better this year at capturing the contenders, in a season of mediocre champs, are the last three in Wisconsin, Miami, and USC? Do Penn State, UCF, and Auburn all have legitimate beefs that they were just as above average as those three (or any one of those three)? What about TCU (it's not our fault we had to play Oklahoma twice!)?

So while my comment earlier was basically a drive by answering the original post, it gets to the heart of it, which is that the single-elimination tournament is a bad way of crowning the season's best anyway you look at it, and when you start looking for different ways to cut this, there is so much subjectivity in a 120-team field that only has a 12 or 13-game season, that years like this one, where no one really looks that great, make it harder.

So no, CFB isn't especially good at crowning a season's champ, but this season wasn't particularly good at providing obvious options.

i still don't know why they decided to create essentially another poll to pick the teams instead of using the bcs polls/system.

But these are the "finest minds in college athletics"!
Seriously, it was a way to manufacture credibility for the process, but failed spectacularly when they can't seem to offer consistency in how they apply their own stated criteria.

You could eliminate polls tomorrow, and there'd be a new one up to replace them the next day.  

Exactly.  Why open themselves up to this?
There should be no poll.  Hell, there should be no weekly release.  There should just be a bracket on the first Sunday in December

but, the media (ESPN) wants to rake cash so............ we have a circus