In a surprising decision that left fans and media reeling, the College Football Playoff (CFP) committee announced on Sunday that the Notre Dame Fighting Irish would not be included in the playoff lineup.
Naturally, this upset Irish fans, but they weren’t alone. Notre Dame’s officials were just as disappointed and expressed their feelings to the committee.
“I’m just shocked and saddened for our student-athletes,” said Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua. “There’s this overwhelming sense of shock and sadness. It feels like we’ve all been punched in the gut.”
Bevacqua went on to criticize the CFP’s weekly rankings, calling it a “travesty.”
“There is no way to justify this result,” he said. “As I mentioned to Marcus, any rankings before this last one are just a joke and a waste of time. Why give these young athletes a false sense of hope when they haven’t played in two weeks, only to yank that away without any explanation?”
“We feel like the playoffs were taken from our student-athletes.”
Just ten days earlier, the Irish were sitting at ninth in the CFP poll. For reasons that remain unclear, the committee then dropped them two spots in the subsequent two votes, despite Notre Dame winning their final game 49-20 and being idle over the weekend. This week’s rankings put the Irish in 11th place, just shy of the final standings.
This decision is even more perplexing given that the committee had been consistently ranking the Irish above Miami, which was 12th at that point. Interestingly, Miami had also been inactive that week yet managed to surpass Notre Dame for the last at-large spot after previously defeating them.
CFP Commission Chairman Hunter Yurachek attempted to clarify the reasoning behind Miami’s relocation ahead of Notre Dame.
“We did a side-by-side comparison, and on paper, they were quite comparable,” Yurachek noted. “The only metric we had to rely on was head-to-head.”
Miami won against Notre Dame 27-24 earlier in the season at Hard Rock Stadium.
While a head-to-head matchup can serve as a reasonable tiebreaker, it raises questions as to why Yurachek sees it as applicable only when the two teams are ranked similarly. If it was meant to be a tiebreaker, why had Notre Dame been ahead of Miami for several weeks prior to the final rankings?
ESPN’s Chris Fowler didn’t challenge Yurachek on this point.
“If the ranking system is valid, there’s no logical explanation for what’s happened to us,” Bevacqua remarked. “We only have one official ranking show at the end, so what’s the point of having any others?”
Some have suggested that Notre Dame should join a conference, believing that would allow them a chance at the conference championship and prevent exclusion from the playoff rankings. However, former independent BYU joined the Big 12 with similar hopes in mind, only to face the same playoff exclusion.
