Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua takes aim at weekly CFP rankings shows

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua went on the offensive Tuesday, two days after the Fighting Irish football team was bumped out of the 2025 College Football Playoffs due to a Week 1 loss to Miami. One year after finishing as the national runner-up, No. 11 Notre Dame (10-2) was snubbed from this year’s 12-team field on Selection Sunday despite entering the weekend seemingly in the mix.

Bevacqua held a 40-minute press conference Tuesday to rail against the College Football Playoff‘s selection process and the ACC for what he described as a “targeted” attack due to the conference’s social media campaign in support of Miami making the field. But the Notre Dame AD also took issue with how the CFP and ESPN drag out their weekly Top 25 ranking reveals, suggesting the selection committee unfairly pulled the rug out from under the Irish, who were No. 10 and firmly in the Playoff field in last week’s penultimate rankings.

“There’s human beings making these decisions, so they’re never going to be perfect. That’s understandable. But with these weekly shows and weekly rankings, very strong signals are being sent,” Bevacqua said during Tuesday’s press conference, citing Notre Dame’s No. 10 ranking in the initial CFP Top 25 poll released after Week 10. “… We’ve done everything from that point to not even put into question whether we should stay at 10 or get better. To me, all the empirical data in the world suggests we should get better. So, we had this starting point of being 10^th, dominated the rest of the (regular) season, and are on the outside looking in. How do you fix that? You either have a series of defined metrics that everybody can rely on and see and know what they’re going into, or you have one ranking show at the end and say, ‘Ok here’s what it is and here’s what we thought.’

“That would have been less of a shock to the system then what happened was. Because if you wake up every day for five or six weeks (thinking) you’re in, you’re in, you’re in … Then you wake up on Sunday and you’re in a room with 18-22 year olds who are like, ‘Ok, are we ninth or 10^th? Let’s get to practice and get going, let’s win a national championship.’ Oh wait a second, sorry, there’s a game where a team went for it on fourth down, that ought to mean something. Or you lost to this team in Week 1 and we asked everybody to go back and watch it. Well, we don’t see the logic in all that. And it’s something that has to be fixed.”

Pete Bevacqua: The CFP rankings ‘can’t be a game of musical chairs at a fifth-grade birthday party’

Notre Dame was moved to No. 9 in Week 12’s CFP Top 25 rankings and stayed there until Week 15, when Alabama (10-3) leapfrogged them after qualifying for the SEC Championship following its 27-20 win over unranked Auburn in the Iron Bowl. The next weekend, the idle Irish dropped another spot to No. 11 on Selection Sunday due in large part to the Week 1 head-to-head loss to Miami.

“These rankings, … they can’t be a game of musical chairs at a fifth-grade birthday party. And that’s what it felt like to us,” Bevacqua added. “We don’t appreciate because of the impact it’s had on the kids in that room, and this university quite frankly. These are big decisions, and we just have not have anybody answer us in a way that gives us any satisfaction at all to what happened.

“Rankings can change, I’m not naive, but … in the future, at least let us respond to a data set that we can rely on. Because if you’re getting a ranking that’s a hollow ranking, you can’t make decisions to improve it because it’s a moving target.”