Notre Dame Joe
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I'm not sure there needs to be a new thread for 2025 in the rearview, but I do have some thoughts:
There is a small part of me that feels like ND is cursed. The sheer amount of things that ND needed to go their way this year, but didn't, is astounding. In this "game of inches," ND fell short in ways that seemed to have cosmic interference. Feel free to add to this list. This is just off the top of my head.
It's not that one or two of these things happened in a vacuum. That'd just be chalked up to what we call "college football." It's the fact that ALL of these things absolutely NEEDED TO HAPPEN in order to keep ND out of the playoffs.....and somehow, some way, that's exactly what happened.
- Miami needed an insane one-handed TD grab by Daniels, a flukey INT, and a last minute FG to beat ND. All season long, Miami was known for shooting themselves in the foot, yet in this game, they played almost flawless. (For comparison, Indiana needed a Miami missed FG, a blocked Punt for a TD, and a Beck INT to win that game last night. Miami provided them with all.)
- A&M needed a botched XP from ND, a gigantic missed holding call, and one of ND's worst defensive efforts on the entire season to win this game by one point.
- Fast forward and towards the middle-to-end of the season there is not one single upset that benefits ND. Not one.
- The ACC royally screws up their own conference tie-breaker and has Duke vs UVA in the CCG instead of UVA vs Miami.
- And then Duke proceeds to win that F'ing game, rendering the Bama/UGA and BYU/TexTech games meaningless because...
- The CFP committee screws ND in unprecedented fashion by keeping a bad Alabama team in and dropping ND to keep from leaving the ACC out. Reasons were completely fabricated.
That's true but most of those were not chance occurrences, but things we were poorly prepared for.IMO, 3 things prevented the Irish from playing for a natty this year ...
1) The ESPN-led CFP committee's fucked-up snub of course (gotta protect the SEC)
2) Al Golden being hired by the Bengals (D definitely wouldn't have started the season that slow if it wasn't for a new DC to get acclimated to)
3) The fumbled snap/missed extra-point demise near the game against A&M (also #2 comes into play here as A&M wouldn't have scored 40+ on a Golden led D).
First example, see Miami's brilliant catch at the end of the first half. Xavier Watts probably stops that, and might just have run it 100 yards the other way.


