This is why I don't buy the whole "CCG losers won't be punished" spiel from the commissioner.
It assumes that every team's path to their conference's championship game is going to be the same across the board. It isn't. It's also why ND jumps Penn State if they lose.
It doesn't even have anything to do with ND. But as of now, ND is ahead of Ohio State. If Penn State loses, they'll have 2 losses and one of those was to Ohio State, at home. You can't have two teams with the same record and have one ahead of the one that they both lost to and have an inferior resume to.
Ohio State played all three of the top 3 teams in the conference, minus themselves. They went 2-1. The lone loss being a road loss to Oregon by a point. They then beat Penn State at Penn State and crushed Indiana by 23.
Assuming they lose, Penn State will have gone 0-2 against the other top 3 in the conference, having lost one of those at home and another at a neutral site.
Head to head matters, resume matters. You can turn around and throw all that out the window and say, "whoop! Well it doesn't count because it was a conference championship game!" - A loss is a loss.
What I interpret those words as, is that those losses will be carefully considered and won't necessarily lock a team out of the CFP altogether. That doesn't mean they just stay where they are, because that would ignore every solitary factor that the CFP committee uses to determining these rankings in the first place.
