None of those scenarios you mention are meaningless to me.
There are only 2 spots for the national championship but there are other things too.
Alabama needs to win out to make a BCS Bowl. It might not be the National Championship game but it's still millions of dollars. Alabama still has an outside shot at the title as well, long odds though.
TCU can still make it if they win out and things go right. Win out and they make a BCS Bowl game and win THAT. TCU losing to BSU last year put them down a peg.
Michigan also needs to continue winning to go up in the rankings. BCS Bowl bid at stake again.
I wouldn't go as far as games don't matter in the NFL. A couple of losses can get a team into a hole really quick (ask Dallas!). College Football is more on rankings from season to season so it's a bit more unique. You build season to season instead of starting from scratch every year. The NFL season this year is mediocre crazy. Is this what College Football wants? We gone over this before, not sure a playoff can be done, number of games, timing, travel, automatic bids etc.... we've gone over all this before earlier in the thread
