TL;DR: The College Football Playoff committee colluded to make sure that an SEC team made it to the playoff, so undefeated Florida State University got cut, and the playoff is between Michigan, Washington, Texas and Alabama, with FSU and UGA as 5 and 6.
This only happened because Georgia lost to Alabama in the SEC championship game imo, but it’s still fucking horrendous that it did happen.
I think, if the selection committee's goal is to choose the best college teams in the country, they should have moved FSU down after their starting quarterback suffered his broken leg if they felt that was impactful. They didn't, and it set up a faulty choice.
I haven't watched enough of the high ranked teams to have a valid idea myself, but based on a seemingly worse loss later in the year, I might have left Texas out of the playoffs...and maintained the traditional Rose Bowl (Mich vs Wash).
With that said, a sizable portion of ranking in this game is pretty poor, and it might get a little worse until haves and have-nots are more entrenched in this new NIL era.