Faced with a tricky choice, the College Football Playoff selection committee fell back on some simple criteria: One loss is better than two. Winning a conference championship is better than not. Go with the team that didn't get blown out.
Oklahoma is in the playoff, moving into the fourth and final spot Sunday after avenging its only loss of the regular season by winning the Big 12 championship game 39-27 against Texas on Saturday.
And with that, the national semifinals are set.
"I feel like we have a team worthy of it, a team that can go make a run," Sooners coach Lincoln Riley said on ESPN.
The fourth-ranked Sooners (12-1) will face No. 1 Alabama (13-0) on Dec. 29 in the Orange Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. It will be a matchup of Heisman Trophy front-runner quarterbacks - Kyler Murray of Oklahoma and the Crimson Tide's Tua Tagovailoa, who sprained his ankle in the Southeastern Conference championship game victory against Georgia on Saturday and is expected to miss at least two weeks.
No. 2 Clemson (13-0) plays No. 3 Notre Dame (12-0) the same day in the Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The winners will meet in the championship game on Jan. 7 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
Georgia (11-2) dropped a spot to fifth after its 35-28 loss to the Tide, and Ohio State (12-1) remained sixth in the selection committee's final top 25 released Sunday. Ohio State won the Big Ten championship game 45-24 against Northwestern on Saturday, but the Buckeyes also lost on Oct. 20 to Purdue - by 29 points - which wound up just 6-6.
Speaking on ESPN, CFP selection committee chairman Rob Mullens talked about what put the Sooners ahead of the Buckeyes and the Bulldogs.
"In the end, one-loss conference champion with their only loss being on a neutral field to a ranked team, which they avenged in their conference championship," he explained. "Every combination was vetted, looking at their full body of work, their résumés side-by-side. In the end, what we decided was amongst the group of three - Oklahoma, Georgia, Ohio State - the committee voted that no one was unequivocally better than the other, so then we leaned on the protocol.
"So we went with the one-loss conference champion."
Selection committee protocol states conference championships work as a virtual tiebreaker when teams are close. The Sooners won the Big 12 by paying the Longhorns back for a three-point loss from Oct. 6.
Oklahoma is making its third appearance in the playoff, which is in its fifth edition. Alabama, last season's national champion, has played in them all. Clemson is making its fourth straight appearance. Notre Dame is in the playoff for the first time, becoming the 10th school that has been represented in the event.
Central Florida (12-0) finished eighth in the final rankings, nowhere to be found in the committee's playoff discussion. The Knights will take their 25-game winning streak to a marquee bowl game, taking on No. 11 LSU in the Fiesta Bowl on New Year's Day.
The debate leading up to championship Saturday was whether Oklahoma or Ohio State might take the fourth spot if Alabama beat Georgia, which will face Texas on Jan. 1 in the Sugar Bowl at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
The discussion's wild card was Georgia potentially beating the mighty Tide, which could have meant two SEC teams in the playoff for the second straight season. Instead, the Bulldogs lost but played well enough to allow coach Kirby Smart to make the case that Georgia should remain in the top four.
Smart told reporters after the SEC title game to ask Alabama coach Nick Saban which team he would like to avoid in the playoff? Saban, of course, endorsed his former defensive coordinator and current conference mate.
The committee didn't buy it, staying with the one consistent data point throughout the five years of CFP selections: No team with more than one loss has ever made the field. Of the 20 teams that have been selected, only two have not won a conference title.
For the second straight season, two of the Power Five conferences were left out, and for the second straight season it was the Big Ten and the Pac-12. Ohio State was the first team out last season and again appears to have gotten squeezed because of a lopsided loss to an unranked team. While it was Purdue doing the damage this time, in 2017 the Buckeyes were hurt by a loss to Iowa.
The Pac-12 was never really in the discussion, with its champion, Washington, finishing 10-3. The Huskies and the Buckeyes will meet in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California.
Georgia had both two losses and a blowout loss (by 20 at LSU in October). The Bulldogs have been rolling since and had Alabama on the ropes before the Tide erased a 14-point deficit. Proving they could hang with the best was not enough to hang on to a spot in the top four.
Oklahoma has had defensive problems all season, but its offense has been virtually unstoppable.