AL and GA are 1 and 2, no question.

If you had a relative ranking, the next team would be at like 12th. Doesn't matter who you put in a 4, 8, 12, 48 team playoff. If you are trying to seed properly to get the best teams in the final, AL and GA are on opposite sides of the bracket.

One value of conferences is that it allows the media to create a narrative to feed interest in primetime games during the season and ratings for their playoff. All year we kept being fed BS about Michigan, Oh State, Pedo State and even Iowa as being on par with AL and GA. They can do that because there are no games that disprove it (they seemed to ignore Oh State getting run by an Oregon team that wasn't even the best in the Pac12, who they ignored). Nope, look at Michigan, they beat 4 top 10 teams, dominated Oh State, destroyed Iowa, etc.

But in the end, GA ran them off the field. Score was closer than the game, same with AL.

Never forget, this is all about money, it's about who can sell the most ads on the games they spend 4 months hyping. If ND had 1 loss to anyone but Cin, they would have gone to the playoff ahead of Cin (the hypocrisy of ND going ahead of the undefeated team that beat them is more than even the mouse can handle, but I guarantee it was discussed) . If OK State had won the Big12 championship game, they would have gone with 1 loss ahead of Cin.