CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek explains why Notre Dame dropped out of playoff field

Notre Dame football’s 27-24 loss at Miami on Aug. 31 didn’t prevent the Irish from being ranked ahead of Miami in the College Football Playoff rankings until the only one that mattered.

When the CFP committee revealed its final rankings that determined this year’s College Football Playoff Field, Notre Dame dropped from No. 10 on Tuesday to No. 11 on Sunday. Meanwhile, Miami jumped from No. 12 on Tuesday to No. 10 on Sunday. That gave Miami a spot in the playoff field and left Notre Dame out of the tournament.

Neither Notre Dame nor Miami played a game during the time between the two rankings were made. But BYU, which was ranked No. 11 on Tuesday between Notre Dame and Miami, lost 34-7 to Texas Tech for the second time this season. That pushed BYU down to No. 12 and out of Miami’s path to leap the Irish in the eyes of the committee.

“The first move in that was we felt like the way BYU performed in their championship game, a second loss to Texas Tech in a similar fashion, was worthy of Miami moving ahead of them in the rankings,” CFP selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek said on ESPN. “And once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungering for with Notre Dame and Miami. And you look at those two teams on paper, and they are almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents, but the one metric we had to fall back on again was the head-to-head.

“I charged the committee members to go back and watch that game again, the Miami-Notre Dame game, because it was so far back, and we got some interesting debate from our coaches on what that game looked like as we watched it. With that in mind, we gave Miami the nod over Notre Dame into that 10 spot.”

ESPN’s Rece Davis pressed Yurachek, the athletic director of Arkansas, for more information on why head-to-head didn’t come up in previous rankings discussions about Notre Dame and Miami when they were close enough to be compared to each other. It’s hard to make sense of Yurachek’s first answer.

“If you recall, Miami was a loser of 2-of-3 when they entered the poll at 18, and they were in close proximity to Louisville at the time, who I believe was below them in 21st or 22nd spot,” Yurachek said. “And we didn’t use the head-to-head metric to compare Miami and Louisville — Louisville a team who had beaten Miami.

“But not until they really got in close proximity side-by-side with the move with BYU were we able to evaluate just those two teams side-by-side. We always had someone between them, whether it was previously Alabama and BYU, and then just BYU in the last week.”

Yurachek seemingly shifted from discussing Miami and Louisville to Miami and Notre Dame in his answer. But his Miami-Louisville comparison doesn’t track with what happened. When the first College Football Playoff rankings were released on Nov. 4, the committee ranked a 7-1 Louisville team at No. 15 and a 6-2 Miami team at No. 18. The Cardinals beat Miami, 24-21, on Oct. 17, and Louisville was rightly ahead of Miami. Perhaps Yurachek meant to highlight the following week’s rankings when 7-2 Miami jumped to No. 15 and 7-2 Louisville dropped to No. 20 after a 29-26 overtime loss to Cal. But this is information Yurachek should be better at articulating when everyone wants an explanation.

Yurachek confirmed that Notre Dame and Miami had been in the same group of teams that were being evaluated against each other prior to this weekend. That’s when Davis asked again why Notre Dame and Miami had to be ranked side-by-side without a team between them for the head-to-head matchup in August to be the determining factor between the two.

“As I mentioned last week in last week’s rankings, we thought Notre Dame was better than BYU and deserved to be ranked higher than BYU,” Yurachek said. “We thought BYU deserved to be ranked higher than Miami, and that’s the way that laid out. After the championship game in the Big 12 and the way BYU performed again against Texas Tech, we felt like Miami deserved to be ranked ahead of BYU, and then you have the direct head-to-head comparison of those teams, Miami and Notre Dame, sitting respectively at 10 and 11 in our poll.”

Miami became the ACC’s lone representative in the College Football Playoff field after Duke beat Virginia, 27-20, in overtime in the ACC Championship on Saturday night. The Blue Devils, who owned an 8-5 record, weren’t ranked high enough for the ACC to earn one of the five spots reserved for the highest ranked conference champions. Those spots went to No. 1 seed Indiana (Big Ten), No. 3 seed Georgia (SEC), No. 4 seed Texas Tech (Big 12), No. 11 seed Tulane (AAC) and No. 12 seed James Madison (Sun Belt). Tulane and James Madison were ranked No. 20 and No. 24, respectively, and Duke didn’t make the top 25.

Yurachek pushed back when asked if the discussion about Miami and Notre Dame was impacted at all by the fact that the ACC wouldn’t have landed a team in the playoff if Miami was excluded.

“It had absolutely no impact,” Yurachek said. “Our charge as a selection committee is to rank the top 25 teams, and then you peel out the five highest conference champions and the seven at-large teams, and that’s what we did to fill out that bracket, and Miami ended up being one of the seven highest at-large teams, and that’s why they’re in the playoff. It’s not because the ACC wasn’t otherwise going to have a representative.”

Though BYU dropped one spot with its loss in the Big 12 Championship game, Alabama wasn’t dinged for losing 28-7 to Georgia in Saturday’s SEC Championship game. Alabama (11-3) is the only three-loss team to make the playoff field, and it did so as the No. 9 seed. Alabama won 24-21 at Georgia on Sept. 27, which must have played a role in the decision to not drop the Crimson Tide. Apparently Alabama’s 31-17 loss at Florida State, which finished the season 31-17, didn’t matter as much as Notre Dame’s loss that same weekend.

“We evaluated all of those conference championship games, and it felt like in the end, regardless of Alabama’s performance yesterday, their body of work in those first 12 games where they had probably the best win, arguably this season, winning at number three Georgia, having a win against Vanderbilt, wins against Tennessee as well, and their strength of schedule was the highest in the top 11,” Yurachek said. “And we felt like in spite of their performance yesterday in the conference championship, they deserved to stay in that nine spot.”