Notre Dame snubbed from College Football Playoff field while Alabama, Miami make it

It felt like everything went the way Notre Dame needed it to on conference championship Saturday for the Fighting Irish to qualify for the 12-team College Football Playoff field.

BYU was blown out by Texas Tech. Alabama got its teeth knocked out by Georgia.

And yet, Notre Dame is still on the outside looking in.

The Crimson Tide (10-3) secured one of the final at-large CFP spots as the No. 9 seed despite a blowout loss to the Bulldogs. And Miami (10-2), a head-to-head winner over the Irish on Aug. 31’s season opener, jumped over Notre Dame (10-2) in the CFP rankings after neither team played a game this weekend. Miami is the No. 10 seed. The Irish finished at No. 11 in the final poll, a ranking that this year goes to the top team to not make the bracket. Group of Five conference champions Tulane and James Madison took the 11 and 12 seeds, respectively.

It’s a brutal blow for the Irish, winners of 10 games in a row all by 10 or more points. They won those games by an average margin of 25.4 points. But Miami kept winning, too, and ended up with the same 10-2 record as the Irish. When it came down to it on the day the bracket was to be set in stone, the CFP committee clearly couldn’t overlook the Hurricanes’ 27-24 Week 1 win over Notre Dame.

It’s also a controversial swapping of Notre Dame and Miami when for five weeks prior to Sunday’s selection, the Irish were ranked higher than the Hurricanes, which implies the committee thought all along that Notre Dame was a better team. But when push came to shove and the two got closer in the rankings, the switch amounts to nothing more than a change of heart.

The human element got involved in a selective process.

Notre Dame was primed to make another run through the playoff bracket had it made it in. Last year, the Irish got in as the No. 7 seed and beat Indiana, Georgia and Penn State on the way to the national championship game against Ohio State.

This year, the Irish would have likely needed to go on the road in the first round. Still, per most oddsmakers and advanced analytical models, Marcus Freeman‘s team would have been favored over every playoff team but Indiana and Ohio State. Yes, that includes Miami.

When the dust settles on a sour selection Sunday, it’ll feel like a “what could have been” type of season for the Irish. Kirk Herbstreit said on Saturday he thinks this Notre Dame team is better than the one that finished as the national runner up a season ago. But he also said that if it came down to it, he thought Miami deserved to be in the field over the Irish.

And that’s the way it went.