Absolutely? No. Funny you default back to wins as the deciding factor. Notre Dame was clearly better the past two months. There were considerable common opponents. Notre Dame dominated those common opponents. Notre Dame lost their first two games. And if you do an honest evaluation, those were both tossups. Miami not only failed to win the conference they failed to make the game because they lost twice to decent, not even great teams. One of those teams was 0-2 versus the Big 12.
The question remains. Best 10 teams or best season/record? Yes, Texas was more deserving than the final two participants. They also were better based on available information than some of the top 10.
Being in a conference has limited value when evaluating strength of schedule. That is consistently brought up. There’s a formula to calculate it. At the end of the regular season, Techs SOS was worse than Notre Dame. Miamis was very similar. And Ole Miss’s was slightly better. There is little to harp on this point when that is the case. Use the metric or not. If Notre Dame had the number 1 SOS, would people still complain? You didn’t give a damn that Miami wasn’t even top two in its conference. You give some hubbub about 8-4 Texas with injuries and losses yet give no credence Miami beating ND at home, on a last second FG, when one team had a new QB, first game of season. You’ll probably tell me Arch grew leaps and bounds but won’t introduce that for Carr.
It has been discussed that Indiana watered down their non-conference. Bill Snyder used to do it. Jim Schlossnagle does it in baseball. It’s not entirely for wins and losses, but that is a reason. You need to view it from the lens of a non-Texas team. Every team in contention is better off with fewer losses. Duke lost 3 games in non-conference last year. They won the conference but didn’t get invited to the tournament. Maybe that doesn’t change their scheduling, but you have to think they thought about it. As you invite more 3 and 4 loss teams into a tournament, you are expanding the number of teams that will fight to keep that extra loss off the ledger. If you have byes and home games, you’re incentivizing teams to lose one less game to get that incentive. Texas clearly missed out because of that extra loss.
If more teams dumb down their non-conference schedule, then it devalues the regular season. If the Tx-OU games has fewer implications, it devalues it. If a team decides, like the high school example I gave you, to play not to win in the final game, that devalues it. I don’t expect that to happen, but it certainly happens in the NFL. I can see sitting a player or two in that scenario however. Let’s just say Texas-Ohio State play every year. You get a small number of other top 20 matchups, but the teams that would typically fall from 15-40 schedule no one. Not only that, but they sit at home for all of them. The college football fan doesn’t win.