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so which team is better Bama or OSU

thats the only question that has merit

Depends on how you view their resumes.
Alabama has a better loss.  Ohio State has better wins.  Alabama has only 1 loss.  Ohio State played more games.  Discounting for now that I think losses are wuss things to be judging potential championship teams on (it really said something about Alabama in 2011 that their biggest resume bullet was a good LOSS), we'll just say that so far they cancel out.  
Ohio State won their division and won their conference.  That would tip it for me.  
Alabama is in due to the eyeball test, which is the biggest pile of crap, considering nobody knows who the "best" teams are just by watching them.  Every week teams win that people thought would lose, and frankly people would make their living gambling if they were so good at predicting the better team.  This has historically been, and should remain, a resume sport.  But lately the rules get bent more and more to accommodate things like ratings, helmet bias, or sheer stupidity of voters.  

Somewhere upthread CousinFred made a statement along the lines of, "at least we can all agree that Alabama is one of the four best teams in the country."  And my answer is, no, I don't think we can all agree on that. 

fully agree...
there should be little doubt that Bama is at least one of the best four teams in the nation.   but... they didn't perform when they most needed to- and should have lost their position because of that one game.
however, they would destroy tOSU, and anyone else from the B10... Clemson is worthy, regardless of their terribly foul loss, and OU is playing as good as any of the other three.  

• Georgia is going to be hard to stop.  their backfield is the best in the nation.  their starting 11 on D is the best starting 11 in the nation.  they're likely the team to beat by my reckoning.  
• Clemson plays to whatever level they are required to play to... they lost to 'cuse, yeah- but it wasn't the rupture tOSU endured to both OU AND Iowa.  Their D is STOUT, and they have likely the best starting lines in the nation.
• OU is playing as well as anyone on O, and have proven it's not a 'conference' thing by lighting up both TCU (x2) and tOSU's nationally ranked D's.  Their D is serviceable and enough to keep them in the game with the other three.
• Bama may not have the best starting lines, nor the best starting O or D in the nation, but they are better than anyone below the top 6.   but to state the obvious, you could rotate three players on either side of the ball and they'd still have a better starting O or D than anyone but the top six... attrition wins.  they'll be fresh when the games begin, and.... they'll be favored throughout the playoffs.

honestly, once folks get over their redasses, this is going to be the best playoff so far.... there isn't a team there that clearly stands out from the others.

Well, I think many of us apes could grasp what you're suggesting, kind of.

It's the same kind of method a college instructor uses to rank students.  You let the top group emerge from the cloud of grades over a semester.  From a class of say 20 students, it can range from 2-3 up to 6-7 in that top grade cluster.  They all get As.  Everyone else gets lower grades, also clustered out.

Here, instead of As, the top group get into the playoff bracket.  The trick of course would be to decide on what the metrics are (for example number of losses, conference championship winners, number of impressive non-conference wins, lack of blowouts, lack of losses to losing teams, etc).  Of course to some extent that's what the BCS system tried to do (at least the metrics part, but not the flexible, or any type of, playoff part).

Exactly.
That's the way groups almost always shake out and many of us deal with things like this all of the time.
I audit contracts based on risk assessment scores.  When you rank them from highest risk to lowest, there are always natural breaks that identify a distinct group of highest but comparably ranked contractors.
Same with reviewing applications to determine which applicants to interview.  You rank them and there's always a top group of applicants worthy of interviewing.
The thing is you always have to let the number shake out naturally.  You can't predetermine it will be 5 or 10 or whatever.
Remember the helmetosity talk.  The same nine schools shake out just about every way you rank programs.  Not four, not six, not ten.  But nine.  
There's always a natural group.  It just doesn't always fit into a pre-determined box.
And here's how you can do it.  You take at least the two P5 team with the best record.  If more than two P5 teams have the same record, you take all of them too.  If a G6 team has record better than the best P5 team's record, you include it too.  Some years you have two teams.  Some years you have six or seven.  So what?  It's all good.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, "Things which mater most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least."

But that's exactly what these pre-set 4, 8 or 16 team playoffs are all about.  That's exactly what worrying about venues is all about.

The best, most worthy teams should go to the playoff every year based on their record so that people don't have to sit around and debate whether or not the fifth best team was really better than the fourth.

It's insanity that we worry about things like networks and venues.

Let the season naturally shake out the teams and then pair them up.   If ESPN or Jerry World are so afraid of being left in the lurch that they object, so what?  Some other, possibly less mercenary entity, will volunteer.  

The point is all about putting first things first and getting it right.  Anybody stands in the way of that they just have their personal or financial interests at heart instead of COLLEGE FOOTBALL.