re: Is the playoff going to hurt the SEC?

Given that strength of schedule no longer matters, I think there's a very good chance that it will. I also think that combined with the push for supposed P5 matchups/P5 superiority, it may well wind up killing off a lot of marquee OOC matchups instead of increasing them. Teams will schedule the Wake Forrests of the world and that will be enough. Why schedule a good team when you can schedule a team that simply has the right membership?

The BCS had unbiased computers to weight who you played and who you lost two against the opinions of polls which rely a great deal on last year or even year's of reputation and simple Ws and Ls - those alogrithims checked the quality of a win or a loss and balanced things against popular opinion/polls. Humans simply don't operate that way and ultimately the selection committee will be under pressure to represent multiple conferences regardless of more unbiased ways of selecting teams as well as under pressure to select teams multiple tv markets -- and don't think catering to more eyeballs on tv sets won't influence selections because it will.