The College Football Playoff committee is testing me, trying to draw me offside. But I'm standing my ground. Four is still better than eight when it comes to selecting the size of your postseason tournament.

Needless to say, I don't express that opinion to win any popularity contests. The masses want more. They believe bigger is always better. This is especially true this week since our esteemed committee deemed winning the toughest conference in the country to be worthless.

I understand Penn State's dismissal, but I don't agree with it. Despite their win over a team picked as the No. 3 seed along with their furious comeback victory over Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship Saturday night, the Nittany Lions were excluded for the simplest of reasons.

Lose two games and you're out. Circumstances, apparently, do not matter.

While most critics think the panel blew it by picking Ohio State, a loser to Penn State on Oct. 22 and a team that was idle last weekend, I would argue that Washington, the No. 4 seed, should have been omitted.

Penn State won a much tougher conference than the Huskies did. Penn State's best wins (Ohio State, Wisconsin) are far more impressive than Washington's (Utah, Colorado). The difference, of course, is the second defeat. Penn State lost a nonconference game to Pitt, which happens to be the only team in the country to beat two teams currently ranked in the top five.

Washington, by committee chairman Kirby Hocutt's own declaration, took no such risks and played the softest nonconference schedule in the land.

If the committee ever wanted to do college football fans a favor and emphasize the need to play somebody in September, this was it. Instead, Washington was rewarded, if that's what you call playing Alabama on Dec. 31.

In spite of this injustice, I think most of the attacks on the committee members -- particularly the one who says they have changed the rules since Ohio State got in over Baylor and TCU two years ago by winning their conference title game -- are ill-founded. They haven't bent the rules, and they aren't playing it by ear.

In every case over the first three years of this playoff, they are choosing teams they believe to be "the best" over the course of 12 or 13 games, not the "most deserving." That's an important distinction.

Penn State clearly falls into the latter category by winning the Big Ten. Ohio State, with resume-enhancing wins over Michigan, Wisconsin and Oklahoma, is indicative of the former.

Now why is four still better than eight? What is wrong with critics' argument that the five conference winners and three wild cards make for a perfectly simple eight-team field?

For me, it is merely that it's too simple. There's no debate, not until December anyway, when we find out who the five conference winners are. It's the chaos of the chase, the teams' need to seek perfection or something close to it that fuels the season-long discussion and sets college football apart from all of our other sporting interests.

Once you spell it all out and expand the field to eight, then it's all about those final four rounds (the conference championships would be the first). Hard-core fans will still sit through those games in October, but once you construct a championship tournament of a certain size, the masses' attention span starts to wander. It's already hard enough in a sport which refuses to consider practical rules that would keep trigger-happy teams from playing four-hour games.

What the committee is really saying here is that conferences, bloated and imbalanced, are not as important as they once were. And they're not wrong about that. The Big 12 is the only league in which all the teams play each other. In the era of 14-team leagues, conference title games are intended as equalizers. But had Minnesota been a little better, the Gophers could have played in (and conceivably won) the Big Ten championship without ever facing Ohio State or Michigan -- teams that were ranked No. 2 and No. 3 on the final week of the regular season.

By the way, an 8-team field also turns that great Ohio State-Michigan overtime game in Columbus into a battle for seeds. Nothing more. Nothing to see here.

I don't like the committee turning college football into basketball, comparing resumes and ignoring conference playoffs. But I feel like that's what it has been instructed to do in choosing "best" over "deserving."

Proponents of an expanded playoff ignore the fact that the championship game teams would be playing 16-game seasons. Just how far do you plan to take this thing in the era of $6 million coaches while advising players that books, tuition and a stipend are plenty?

A bigger playoff would be entertaining, but at what price? Keep in mind we're talking about sympathy here for a Penn State team that lost twice. And unless you're going to lose those games as LSU did in 2007 -- both in triple overtime, about as close to achieving ties as it comes -- then you're always going to run a certain amount of risk.

Until Saturday night, we thought winning a tough conference title game would make up for that. With the choice of Washington over Penn State, the committee sent out an alarming message: Get Pitt off your schedule and give Portland State a call.

Twitter: @TimCowlishaw