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I can't fault the committee here.  Basically, we need to adjust our brains from how we normally think of football wins and losses to more like how baseball is.  Within the playoff population (4 great teams), the difference between the best and worst is small.  I'm not talking about how good they genuinely are, but in terms of how often the worse team will beat the best team.  That's why baseball seasons are so long - each individual outcome is so much closer to a 50/50 result that it takes many outcomes to yield a valid result (season).
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Yet here we are, with a sample size of 3 games (2 semis, championship game) to determine these results based on outcomes that are very nearly a coin flip - anyway, much nearer a coin flip than a regular season game chosen at random.
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It makes you reconsider those mythical national champions from the past - they weren't some special great teams...they were beneficiaries of good timing and luck of the draw.  A loss in September instead of October.  An upset in a totally different conference benefiting your team or 4 top 10 teams happening to lose the same week you beat a ranked team, etc.  We don't want to hear it, but it's all VERY random.  

It makes you reconsider those mythical national champions from the past - they weren't some special great teams...they were beneficiaries of good timing and luck of the draw.  A loss in September instead of October.  An upset in a totally different conference benefiting your team or 4 top 10 teams happening to lose the same week you beat a ranked team, etc.  We don't want to hear it, but it's all VERY random. 

Osborne pointed this out many times, especially after winning a couple

the only redeeming quality of the playoff

2 great games between 4 very good teams

And sometimes a huge blowout.
31-0
59-20
38-0
24-7
24-6
30-3
44-16

I mean, it’s sports. You take the good teams and hope. And sometimes there’s just a big ole gap. 

2017 Alabama that we saw against Auburn was a 4 seed (or maybe shouldn't even be in).  But then they got 4 weeks to get healthy and the playoff Bama was a much better team.  Obviously, you can't account for something like that when you are seeding.  For example, should Clemson get a bump to the 2 seed because their TE who was suspended til now may be an impact player?  

OAM had a premise last season that teams disappointed in their bowl game play poorly (which I think we all agree with to some degree or another).  Who is disappointed this season?  UGA comes to mind, I lean to thinking Baylor beats them in an ugly game like 23-17.  Penn State is probably not disappointed except in their opponent, which is another story, and Florida might be overlooking UVA plausibly, but that too is different.

UGA was disappointed last year as well after losing to Bama late in the game (again).

I strongly agree with OAM's premise about teams that are disappointed in their bowl tend to under-perform.  This year there seems to be less of that than normal because LSU, tOSU, and Clemson have been basically assumed to the CFP for months so there really isn't a team that spent all of October and November thinking CFP then suddenly fell out.  

Utah kinda fits but they didn't really seem to have a chance until the very end, then lost it.  

Georgia might fit.  

I think Bama is the most obvious not so much because of this year as because they went to the CFP the last five years so nobody there has ever missed the CFP before.  That has to be disappointing no matter how you try to spin it.  

The question is whether this is just a sample size issue, or indicative of a wider problem in the polls/committee?

To be honest, with proper seeding, a 1 seed should win the whole thing more than 25% of the time, but less than 100%. The question is how close to those two extremes is "correct", and that question boils down to just how much difference there is between the strength of #1 vs #2, #3, and #4. Still, a #1 seed in my opinion should be expected to win the whole thing maybe 30% of the time at minimum, or 40% of the time at maximum. 

This year, for example, Vegas has LSU as a 14 point favorite over OU, and ESPN's FPI has LSU's win probability at 67.5%. If we make the assumption that LSU, as the higher seeded [and therefore supposedly stronger] team than OSU/Clemson would have a >50% win probability in that game, it would still require a 60% win probability in the final (over a team perceived significantly stronger than OU this year) to reach 40% win probability for the #1 seed. 

So we've had 5 instances of the CFP, and the expected number of times for a #1 seed to win is somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times. That it's been 0 in only 5 instances might be simple due to small sample size. 

Or it might not... You all know my thoughts on how to crown a champion in college football. Some might argue that if a committee made up of CFB experts, whose sole solitary job is to find the best four teams in the land (and seed them according to strength), and they can't pick the #1 team, how could pollsters be any better? Even worse, if the #4 team has a winning record and has won 2 out of 5 so far, might it be that they're actively seeding BADLY such that the consensus weakest team of the 4 is the second best performing seed, it suggests that maybe the "experts" don't know as much as we thought. 

It's for that reason that I eschew the idea that only the "best teams" deserve to be in the BCS or CFP. Because we're notoriously bad at determining who the "best teams" are. So I fall back on the hybrid system of "most deserving" teams plus a few "at large" teams that are deemed worthy but didn't meet the objective criteria. 

Go to an eight-team playoff. Either the 5 power conference champs plus 3 at-large, or the 5 power conference champs plus 1 highest ranked G5 conference champ, plus 2 at-large.

Because if even the committee can't get seeding right, how do we even know they're getting the best 4 teams right? ESPN FPI has five teams higher than OU's FPI this year. Are we really sure they're the fourth best team in the land?