It's not do or die but there are still playoff stakes. Byes, home field, all of which could be highly consequential depending on who you're playing and who you get to avoid.
It might seem unfair, but as I've been saying about the CFP committee, if the question is "who is the best" why should evidence that comes from a conference championship game be ignored? For example, what happens if Virginia beats Duke in a very unimpressive way, and their best guys all get injured in the process. In that case, why should Virginia get an automatic qualification? When the dust settles, maybe the five "best" conference champions are from the SEC, B1G, Big XII, and two G5 conferences.
Virginia could cry "that's not fair, we would have been better off if we didn't play in the conference championship game"
And the correct response to Virginia would be, the committee's job isn't to reward teams for winning, it's to select the "best" teams to ensure that the CFP has the best participants and is as competitive as possible. If Virginia shows us that it is not one of the five "best" conference champions and that it is not one of the seven "best" at large teams, I don't particularly care or have much sympathy for the fact that we wouldn't have known about Virginia's lack of merit if it hadn't been for that last game against Duke. The committee knows now, and its job is to select the "best" and not the most "deserving."
On the flip side, I believe we exposed Texas A&M, and they might actually be benefiting from avoiding another chance to be exposed. Is anyone crying, "that's not fair, Texas A&M would have a lower seed if they had to face Alabama in Atlanta" or anything along those lines? The same can be said about Oregon and Ole Miss.
The correct response is that the committee's job isn't to punish teams for failing to qualify for a conference championship game; it's to select the "best" teams to ensure that the CFP has the best participants and is as competitive as possible. Texas A&M showed us that it is one of the seven "best" at large teams. We can speculate that some team it hasn't played yet is likely to have exposed them as frauds, but that kind of speculation is no substitute for evidence. Right now the best evidence that Texas A&M is a fraud came from Notre Dame (got unlucky and lost at home), South Carolina (self explanatory), and Texas (27-17). These kinds of speculative arguments can be made in favor of and against basically any team in the field. If you are selecting the "best" then you ask who is playing the best football right now and who is likely to play that level of football in the playoffs. That is why Texas A&M should go down in the rankings (it's also "fair" because they just lost), it is why Ole Miss should also go down (Kiffin gone, so while it might not feel "fair" it would be a logical conclusion that they won't be able to play as well), and it is why Oklahoma's narrow win over LSU should give the committee strong reason to reconsider if it really is a top ten team.
All I ask for is a fair process for determining who the best teams are, even if that fair process leads to outcomes that feel unfair because they punish teams for making (and losing) CCGs or for having their coaches poached away. It is more important that the best teams be selected than it is for the most deserving teams or the teams with the best records not to be excluded.