Earlier this year I complained about the Mateer injury because I wanted to play a healthy OU. Part of my reasoning was that we wouldn't get credit for beating OU if their backup QB played, and even if Mateer played people would say he sucked because his hand was still hurt. To a certain degree, that's what is happening now - I've heard at least two national talking heads mention that his hand wasn't fully healed when OU played us in the context of ranking OU ahead of us despite the head-to-head.
But here's the thing - I was wrong. Not in the sense of being factually inaccurate, but in the sense of being worried about something that won't matter.
College football fans and journalists love narratives. Each season has stories and those stories impact how we view our team and the sport more broadly. And that's what you are talking about here and what I was talking about with the Mateer injury, narratives. We don't like how those games went because we knew how people would spin the story. But the committee doesn't work that way. Most of the comparisons they do are blind and are data driven. Although the "narratives" may have some secondary influence on how committee members think about the season, it's impact is de minimis. Now I'm not an idiot to say that the committee doesn't look at the teams or that they are completely blind. But to the extent that they compare helmets, they do it with an eye towards money and ratings. And that kind of bias will always favor Texas.
That's a long way of me saying that I'm sympathetic to your concerns, but that they are ultimately misplaced. The refs tried to job us pretty hard, but it won't affect the rest of our season.