Here's the thing about Baylor: their non conference schedule was so bad that they had no margin for error this year if they wanted to be assured of a spot in the playoff. They knew that going into the season.
This is compounded by the fact that they play in the only major conference without a championship game, thus one less opportunity for a big, neutral site win that every other conference champion is going to get, literally the day before the committee has to come out with their picks.
So, for the 2014 season, Baylor knew the score. They also knew that if they went undefeated, they would be in the playoff. If you are in one of the big 5 conferences and you go undefeated, you will be in the playoff. The chances of the 5 power conferences all producing an undefeated champion in the same year are so small that they are weren't considering, thus if you go undefeated in a major conference, you are making the playoff.
If you are a major conference team with one loss, you might make the playoff, but you might not. If you win your conference, that helps separate you from other potential playoff teams. This is where the Big 12 screwed Baylor over this year in favor of TCU. The Big 12 could have said that in the event of a tie between two teams, the winner of the head-to-head matchup would be crowned Big 12 Champion. That would have been Baylor this year. Instead, the Big 12 saw that the committee favored TCU, even after their loss to Baylor, so they wanted TCU to be able to claim to be the conference champion as well. They thought that this would give them better odds of at least one of their schools making the playoff. I believe this backfired and hurt Baylor's candidacy. If Baylor would have been crowned the true league champion, there would have been less splitting of the vote between the two and it might have helped Baylor get in ahead of Ohio State. Probably not, but maybe.
So, back to Baylor's resume. They had three non-conference games:
SMU - a team that won a single game all year.
Northwestern State - not only an FCS team, but a mediocre one.
Buffalo - a mid-level MAC team
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that if Ohio State had a comparable non-conference schedule to Baylor that they would be undefeated right now and this whole conversation would be moot.
And, yes, Baylor has to play 9 conference games, but so does every team in the other power conferences when you include the championship games*. Ohio State's 9th conference game was Wisconsin, so OSU played the six other teams in the Big Ten East plus the two best in the west, plus Illinois who is at least bowl eligible.
*And the Pac-12 Champion will always have to play 10 Conference games because they play 9 in the regular season plus the title game.
So, despite the fact that Baylor's non-conference schedule was among the weakest among Power 5 teams and despite the fact that they didn't have the extra conference title game to impress the committee, they still could have easily made the playoff if they had just beaten 7 win West Virginia. But they did not. I think Baylor's resume was also hurt because their biggest wins were all at home (TCU and Kansas State). The road win at Oklahoma was impressive, but tarnished by the Sooners' subpar season.
Also - I'd like to point out that since the Big 12 conference does not have a title game, every team gets an extra bye in their schedule. If makes it easier to run the table when you get an extra week off during the season. True that your conference foes get an extra week off too, but I think it's a greater advantage for the elite teams who have to deal with the weekly mental and physical grind of trying to run the table in your conference.
So, when you look at the whole season, Baylor just didn't do enough to get in this year. If Florida State had lost to Georgia Tech, they would have definitely fallen out and Baylor would be in though both schools would only have one loss. And this despite the fact that FSU's non-conference schedule included Florida, Notre Dame and Oklahoma State. All three of those team underachieved this year, but at least Florida State tries to schedule actual opponents and not automatic W's in the non-conference season. So I don't think the argument that the committee favored name brands hold much water. FSU is the defending champion, has the defending Heisman winner, is the only undefeated team and is a huge name brand but the committee did not exactly rubber stamp them throughout the year.