2025 College Football Playoffs

BleedBlueGold said:

Can you post the direct link please? I don't have twitter. No socials, boys. It's the chicken soup for the soul.

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bumpdaddy said:

Sorry, just getting around to seeing this. I don't want to rehash an argument that died down, but I think we should put to rest your line of thinking here.

As others have pointed out, you were wrong in the broader sense - the committee was going to shaft ND even if they had blown teams out by bigger margins. But you are also wrong on substance, and your attachment makes that pretty clear.

The 3rd bullet point, the one I'm sure you were referring to, says this:

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'For comparable teams, the committee will consider... comparative outcomes of common opponents (without incenting margin of victory)"​

The bolded part is what you got wrong. Margin of victory is not only NOT supposed to be a big factor when comparing outcomes against common opponents (it can be considered, but only to a certain extent), but the committee is also instructed to make sure they don't incentivize margin of victory. Which means, if anything, the committee should have given ND credit for blowing out common opponents without running up the score by pulling starters once the games were out of hand, and should have penalized Miami (or at least criticized them) for doing the opposite; keeping starters in, calling time-outs in the final minutes of blowouts, etc.

I just wanted to make this clear because other people share your opinion, so I wanted to set the record straight. If the committee actually was blindly looking at margin of victory of common opponents, they were violating their own rule.

Which goes back to the broader point - it didn't matter what ND did. The committee was going to shaft them regardless.

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Bane said:

The setting up of Ole Miss in the 6 seed and pairing Bama and OU together ensures that probably the 3 weakest P4 teams in the field have 2 teams advance. At the time, moving Ole Miss up to the 6 seed after they lose their coach made no sense, but they were likely anticipating a situation like this and were trying to protect a SEC brand. Keeping Bama at 9 ensures that they'll be matched up with another shitty SEC team with no offense and OU will probably win like 7-0 on a pick six.

Also, keeping UGA at 3 means we have a likely SEC on SEC match up, a rematch of OM and UGA. That locks in the SEC with a one of the final four spots.

It's just a cartel to protect the P2 brands and make everyone a pile of money.

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Bane said:

The setting up of Ole Miss in the 6 seed and pairing Bama and OU together ensures that probably the 3 weakest P4 teams in the field have 2 teams advance. At the time, moving Ole Miss up to the 6 seed after they lose their coach made no sense, but they were likely anticipating a situation like this and were trying to protect a SEC brand. Keeping Bama at 9 ensures that they'll be matched up with another shitty SEC team with no offense and OU will probably win like 7-0 on a pick six.

Also, keeping UGA at 3 means we have a likely SEC on SEC match up, a rematch of OM and UGA. That locks in the SEC with a one of the final four spots.

It's just a cartel to protect the P2 brands and make everyone a pile of money.

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CTIDANDREW said:

In a head to head comparison between Notre Dame vs Miami we had (1) comparative stat between us and Miami that was still under our control after we lost to them to open the season. Comparative outcomes of common opponents.

We could no longer do anything about the H2H result, and we could no longer do anything about our Strength of Schedule.

If we want to make the good faith argument (which I understand people don't believe) that the committee was going by thier criteria, don't you think our H2H case would have been better (even if just slight) if we were to beat Pittsburgh, Stanford, NC State by a wider margin then we did.
We all watched the first half of both the Pittsburgh and Stanford games. We could and should have won both by 40+
I understand your point of "without incenting margin of victory"
I would have liked for our boys to test that rule a little bit, that is all.

For example, if we would have had the talking point of ND beat Stanford, Pittsburgh, NC State, Syracuse by 200 points combined
Miami beat those same four opponents by only 128 points.
It may have swayed some eye balls in the committee room to look closer at the power metrics more that were all in our favor, and showed we had improved at a higher clip then Miami since that week 1 lose.

We just didn't really have any good talking point against Miami, when it came down to just us H2H as the final spot.
That is all I'm saying.

It is obvious it has created a lot of backlash on the forum and that is fine.
There are a lot of smart people on here, and I respect that.
I guess I'm just trying to make sense of what happened yesterday in my mind.

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bumpdaddy said:

Sorry, man, I just gave you a black and white example of why, if the committee was strongly moved by margin of victory, they were violating their own rules. You think the lesson learned is to accept that and just run up scores anyway. I'm saying, if you think we can "play the committee's game" and remove some talking point that will then put the committee in a pickle, you're kidding yourself. If the committee can break their own rules for any reason, they'll continue to do so. Taking away one talking point just means they'll come up with some other bullshit to replace it. It'll be like playing whack-a-mole. It's a waste of energy to consider.

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FWIrish4 said:

Look how giddy the ENTIRE ESPN crew is. Masks completely off for their hatred of ND. This is completely insane.

(Original poster is obviously an ND hater as heads up)

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Bane said:

The setting up of Ole Miss in the 6 seed and pairing Bama and OU together ensures that probably the 3 weakest P4 teams in the field have 2 teams advance. At the time, moving Ole Miss up to the 6 seed after they lose their coach made no sense, but they were likely anticipating a situation like this and were trying to protect a SEC brand. Keeping Bama at 9 ensures that they'll be matched up with another shitty SEC team with no offense and OU will probably win like 7-0 on a pick six.

Also, keeping UGA at 3 means we have a likely SEC on SEC match up, a rematch of OM and UGA. That locks in the SEC with a one of the final four spots.

It's just a cartel to protect the P2 brands and make everyone a pile of money.

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Leverage vs Legacy: Notre Dame and the College Football Cartel

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College football’s second 12-team playoff made one thing brutally clear: when data and consistent application of it point one way and the conference and media incentives point another — well, you can guess what wins. The message wasn’t exactly subtle. In a system owned by a couple of major conferences and their broadcast partner, the last major independent is useful as inventory and leverage, but never quite as a protected asset.

This was of course a position that Notre Dame has always willingly accepted as the cost of doing business while maintaining a modicum of independence. But when due process in a playoff architecture built around conference cartels and media rights is forgone and integrity is compromised, it is indeed amusing when the perpetrators gnash their teeth when the Fighting Irish finally drop the gloves and respond in kind.

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Since everyone’s already rehearsing their takes on Notre Dame “quitting” on a bowl invitation against BYU, another team who was arguably shafted by this new system, it’s probably worth starting with the basic sequence of events over the last few weeks.

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After dropping the first two games of the season by a combined four points against two playoff teams, Notre Dame finished the season 10–2 and had been sitting ahead of Miami, a team it lost to in the summer, in the CFP rankings for five consecutive weeks. In the final two weeks, Alabama barely survived a 5–7 Auburn team whose coach had just been fired for his abysmal on-field product, and then got folded by Georgia in the SEC title invitational, while Miami and Notre Dame sat at home (Miami watching a 7–5 Duke team take home the ACC trophy).

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All week, CFP chair Hunter Yurachek had been saying the committee was torn between Notre Dame and Alabama and that Alabama’s escape at Auburn just barely nudged them ahead, and made clear that ND hadn’t been compared to Miami all season because they felt ND was the better, more consistently dominant team after rattling off 10 straight wins in a “win-or-die” elimination run.

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Fast forward to the final rankings-drop ESPN television event, and after getting embarrassed in Atlanta in a performance that disgraced Saban’s legacy, with negative 3 rushing yards (after the committee specifically stated part of what was holding Bama back relative to ND and some of the teams above it was its poor rushing attack), Alabama does not move at all despite the Dawgs’ evisceration and the middling 2–2 finish to the season, while Miami suddenly jumps Notre Dame solely on the basis of a Week One head-to-head that had been sitting there for months.

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Unpacking Notre Dame's Gripe​

Notre Dame’s anger here is about the sequencing and the logic. If Miami’s head-to-head win truly made their résumé clearly better, that should have been reflected earlier rather than when nothing else was changing, and the Committee shouldn't have spent 5 weeks telling the country that, despite being compared against each other in the same "pod", they believed ND was the better team. And if Alabama’s profile was honestly evaluated by the committee, a close win over a bad Auburn and a decisive loss to Georgia should have pushed them down, not locked them in. Yet after Alabama lost by 21 points in their championship game that wasn't as close as the score implied, it did not drop a single spot (staying No. 9). While BYU lost by 27 points in their championship game and conveniently dropped below Miami. Notre Dame understandably feels if Alabama had been treated like BYU, the Irish would be in.

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Instead, the committee held Notre Dame as a “contender” on the CFP ranking shows to create drama & engagement, then used selectively applied criteria at the 11th hour to keep Alabama safely in front and to parachute Miami over ND with zero new on-field data. From Notre Dame’s perspective, that was evidence that the entire process was scripted around inventory needs, not football results, which is why they’re using (extremely intentional) strong words like “stolen” and “corrupt” instead of “disappointed,” and this is important context.

The Pop-Tart Bowl: A Tradition Unlike Any Other​

On the same day the committee finished its sleight of hand, Notre Dame used its social channels to announce that it would not accept a bowl bid, likely vacating a Pop-Tarts Bowl date with BYU and handing the slot to Georgia Tech. On the surface, this feels off-brand for a program that has preached “choose hard” as both a slogan and an ethos. If you claim that you embrace difficult paths, walking away from a competitive game and extra practice reps looks like a self-inflicted wound layered on top of the committee’s insult.

Inside the program, the calculus was different. Player leadership reportedly concluded that with a wave of impending opt-outs for draft preparation and injury recovery, the version of Notre Dame that would take the field in Orlando would not meaningfully represent the group that just played ten elimination-style games in eleven weeks. They were not convinced that rolling out a shell roster for a relatively meaningless exhibition did anything for the legacy of this team. Freeman and the administration listened and agreed. In that sense, the decision was merely a choice to prioritize the actual players and the integrity of what they built over a payout and another financial windfall for broadcasters.

The Obvious Solution that Will Never Come​

The logical endpoint of that critique is not a cosmetic tweak from twelve teams to sixteen, or swapping out one token G5 slot for another. It is taking the rankings away from a committee whose biases and incentives are structurally impossible to police. A return to a BCS-style framework, where transparent computer models and clear inputs drive the order, would not eliminate controversy. Teams 17 and 18 in a sixteen-team bracket would still complain. Close calls would still exist. But it would sharply constrain the ability of networks and leagues to massage outcomes in the shadows, and it would end the theater of a supposedly deliberative body reverse-engineering reasons to justify decisions it effectively made weeks in advance.

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Notre Dame cannot fix all of that alone. What it can do, as the only true national independent brand with leverage, is refuse to pretend that what just happened was an honest disagreement over résumés. The committee has shown everyone what it is. The only rational response is to strip it of power. Independence is not the problem; opaque, captured governance is. If the sport wants to retain any credibility with players and fans, it needs to kill the current committee, re-center selection on something that cannot be lobbied in a hotel ballroom, and treat the weekly rankings as more than serialized content for a rights holder. “Choose hard” in that context does not mean joining a conference to make ESPN’s life easier. It means pushing for a system that is harder to manipulate, that is indifferent to which logo sits on which sideline, and that treats the games as actual data inputs rather than subjective props that can be framed in whatever flavor the week’s events require.

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The Sacred Conference Championship Weekend​

The committee’s behavior over the last month only makes sense if you look at it backwards from the political end state and then watch them color in the math. A week after dropping an offensively anemic stinker against Oklahoma, a team that itself has one of the most inept offenses among any ranked team, Alabama survives Auburn with a fluky cocktail of bounces, botches, and late-game chaos, then walks into Atlanta and gets physically smothered by Georgia. Negative rushing yards. One competent touchdown drive aided by thirty free yards in flags and a referee literally screening a Georgia defender downfield.
If you were watching the SEC invitational, you could see the machinery spin up in real time. With a 28–7 score glowing over Herbstreit and Fowler’s shoulders, the booth suddenly pivoted from calling the actual game to pre-spinning the rankings show: BYU “has to drop,” that would line up Miami and Notre Dame head-to-head, and then the committee would be “forced” to honor Week 1 and leave ND home — the rationale being that BYU was torched in its conference title game. That Alabama’s third, worst loss in a game the two had not yet finished announcing might drop them behind the team who’d spent two weeks ranked above them before Bama’s impressive Auburn win of course never even entered the conversation. The SEC logo itself functions as an extra line on the résumé. Just appearing in that game proves surely you’re one of the best teams in the country; the result itself is thus purely cosmetic.

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For the Love of the Sport: Realignment in the CFP Landscape​

That posture only really makes sense against the backdrop of the last round of realignment and the way the media money is wired, and it’s no secret that the forces of capital have subsumed whatever integrity this sport ever had. Oklahoma and Texas jump to the SEC to chase a rights deal; USC and UCLA detach from their geography to join a Midwest league; Stanford and Cal end up in something still called the Atlantic Coast Conference. Inside these swollen leagues, schedules overlap just enough to maintain the illusion of a unified conference, but in practice they operate as parallel ecosystems with radically different difficulty curves depending on the draw. The SEC had a four-way tiebreaker just to decide who gets to Atlanta; six of its teams are bad enough to fire their head coaches; the league hasn’t produced a national champion in three seasons; three of the top five teams in the sport play elsewhere. And still, when the committee sits down with ESPN cameras trained on it, “SEC champion or close enough” functions as a trump card over everything from ESPN’s own FPI to margin dominance to loss profile — asset protection for the rights holder.

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Notre Dame’s role in this is almost perversely inverted. The same program everyone loves to accuse of “special treatment” is the one that historically got shut out of the club. Early in the last century, the Big Ten’s power brokers — Michigan and Yost at the center of it — repeatedly blocked ND because they didn’t want a Catholic school in the league beating them at their own sport. Shut out of the cartel, Rockne took the show on the road, built a national schedule by hand, and ended up with a national following in a sport that had been almost entirely regional. Decades later, that work produced the NBC deal in 1991, which gave the university enough direct media leverage to tell the Big Ten to fuck off when the voting calculus flipped and full membership suddenly looked attractive to everyone else. Independence stopped being an imposed reality and became an institutional identity, with all the costs that implies: you schedule nationally, you live with no conference safety net, and, in an era of conference-centric playoff math, you pay an independence tax every December.

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So when someone like Matt Barrie chirps that Notre Dame could “fix” this by joining a conference, that is not neutral advice. ESPN holds the ACC rights. An ACC that features Miami, Clemson, Florida State, and Notre Dame under the same media umbrella is a vastly more valuable bargaining chip for them in their arms race with Fox and NBC. “Join a conference” is not some abstract fairness principle. It is an instruction that conveniently funnels an independent brand into a property that a network owns. The problem is not independence. The problem is a playoff structure whose gatekeepers and storytellers, manufacturing the consent of public opinion, are the same few entities with the same aligned interests. To hell with capitalism — please join our collective bargaining arrangement so we can profit on your brand and your efforts building it.

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That context of course gets erased entirely when people talk about Notre Dame as if it’s some greedy, pampered outlier refusing to join polite society, a narrative assisted by conflicted broadcasters who work incessantly to shape the sport in the interest of their bottom lines. While the rest of the FBS spent the last few years detonating geography and rivalries to chase marginal media dollars, Notre Dame sat still. It hooked itself part-time to the ACC in other sports, kept football independent, and tried — imperfectly — to keep the thing tethered to a real student-athlete model while NIL collectives, agents, and late-night TV kickoff windows ballooned around it. You can argue about how successfully they thread that needle, but at a baseline they are clearly not the ones auctioning out their existence to the highest bidder. Yet somehow, in the current script, they’re the ones being lectured about responsibility and gratitude and setting a good example for its athletes.

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Conference Is King​

And about the ACC, this farce of a league that just watched a 7–5 Duke team win its championship because of its grossly negligent foresight and gaming of conference schedules to ensure its very few decent teams never consistently play each other in the same season, which has the gall to act as if Notre Dame is the freeloader in the relationship. Economically it’s the opposite: Notre Dame’s partial membership and scheduling agreement are among the most valuable assets in the ACC portfolio. When the Big Ten and SEC were circling, one of the things that kept the ACC from cracking apart altogether was the presence of Notre Dame and the hope that the brand would keep anchoring interest and inventory. And yet, as the season wound down, the ACC apparatus spent weeks openly campaigning for Miami over Notre Dame — looping the Week 1 game on ACC Network, sending Jim Phillips and assorted talking heads out to flatten the entire debate into “head-to-head settles it.” The message was clear: thanks for stabilizing the conference, please ignore our ACC tie-breaking messiness, but now that CFP payouts are on the line, we’re lobbying against you because we need a full-member flag on the bracket who won’t embarrass us any more than we already perennially embarrass ourselves.

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Drop all of that into the CFP room, which is structurally tilted toward conference commissioners and their proxies, and Notre Dame’s ranking looks less like a mystery or unfortunate circumstance and more like a foregone conclusion. You have Alabama, a flagship of ESPN’s crown-jewel property; you have Miami, the only plausible ACC team with a path in after a tiebreaker kept them out of Charlotte; and you have Notre Dame, the one program that isn’t owned by a league and isn’t contractually obligated to feed anyone’s media bundle. When those are the inputs, of course the committee leans into whatever fig leaf is available: no conference title game, an early loss in Miami (in 100-degree heat with a first-time starter at quarterback, a young secondary covering for an injured starting line), and whatever SOS angle can be reverse-engineered. Never mind that the Irish were the fourth-best betting favorites for winning it all, or that the A&M loss was capped with the most blatant missed holding call in the history of college football by an SEC officiating crew. The mandate is to make the bracket work for the cartel, and independence gives them a clean pretext to park Notre Dame just outside it.

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Reexamining the Bowl “Snub”​

Seen through that lens, the spurning of a consolation bowl is a rare moment of choosing not to validate the script. Bowls in the expanded playoff era are already watching their meaning evaporate. They exist as content: live programming to wrap commercial breaks around. Notre Dame showing up in one of those slots after being told, explicitly, that its independence disqualifies it from the grown-up table would be a free gift of inventory to the same people who just priced them as an expendable outlier. Declining that invitation doesn’t punish BYU, and it doesn’t sabotage the roster’s development in any meaningful way, no matter how many crocodile tears and moral lectures the corporate media brainwashes the masses with. It simply says: if our role in your ecosystem is to be leverage in September and ballast in December while you lecture us about gratitude on television, you can do it without our logo in your ad deck.
Pete Bevacqua is not stumbling into that logic by accident. This is someone who used to sit on the other side of the rights negotiation, as president and chairman of NBC Sports. He knows exactly how the money moves, how conferences sell their inventory, and how playoff selection rhetoric is weaponized to nudge outliers into line. When he calls the process a farce and then pulls Notre Dame from the bowl pool, he’s not throwing dishes in the kitchen; he’s adjusting the price of doing business with the last independent brand that actually moves a national needle. In a sport where almost every other institution has learned to live with being treated as a line item, that kind of refusal reads as heresy.

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So if the talking point this week is that Notre Dame is “setting a bad example” or “teaching players to walk away when they don’t get their way,” fine. That’s the luxury of being the landlord: you get to moralize when an unhappy tenant refuses to wax grateful. But strip away the sermon and what’s left is simple. A playoff system run by conference stakeholders and their broadcast partner sent a message to the last major independent: your autonomy will be treated as a flaw in the model no matter what your performance data says, and we’re going to encourage other teams to blackball you until you join our dysfunctional union of value extraction. Notre Dame’s response was to stop pretending that a consolation exhibition at the end of that process is some sacred obligation rather than a TV product.

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If that lands them, once again, in the role of the hated, I’m not sure they mind. The place has been fighting upstream against one cartel or another for a century. Fuck ’em. Every story needs an antagonist. If this is the version college football has written, I’m comfortable with Notre Dame doing what its name has always threatened to do anyway: fight, even if it means taking off the halo and becoming the villain college football has always cast them as. Love them or hate them, it’s good cinema

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CTIDANDREW said:

That is fair.
We have (8) months of no games to talk about. Just thought it was worth putting out there.

We didn't really have any great argument for why we deserved to get in over Miami. Which for the last few weeks looked like the most likely team we would be pitted against.
Lost the H2H
We both played (4) games versus the same opponents, and the margin of victory was basically the same
SOS basically the same
Power Metrics were close enough that we couldn't really point to it as a obvious lean in our favor.

I just personally felt that if we would have won the games versus Pittsburgh, Stanford, and NC State by wider margin we could have used that as a data point in our favor in the H2H argument against the Canes.
That is all

It likely would have not made a difference, but I would have liked to have seen it, and believe it is a learning lesson for next season if we find ourselves in a similar situation in the second half of the season fighting for an at large bid.
I'll leave it at that.

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Whiskeyjack said:

Continued from above:

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IRISHDODGER said:

This year’s team reminds me of the 2002 USC team that slaughtered Iowa in the Rose Bowl. That team was led by Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer but they had two early season close losses that prevented them from entering the BCS conversation. But I remember thinking at the time, they were playing the best football in the nation by season’s end.

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Terry Jillery said:

Did my part today. Canceled YouTubeTV, Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+, my Disney trip over spring break, and told my kids no when they asked to watch The Santa Clause and put on Polar Express instead.

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IrishBryan77 said:

The polar Express was written by a Michigan grad. Burn that shit too. 🤣

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ab2cmiller said:

Reece Davis was more vocal towards the beginning. Then he fell into line, not necessarily saying they weren't worthy, but continuing to pound Head to Head relentlessly. I'm sure this was at the direction of the powers that be.

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ab2cmiller said:

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2013Irish said:

Was Joey Galloway the only ESPN panelist that advocated for ND in the slightest?

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ab2cmiller said:

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Bane said:

Bingo. By getting 5 teams in the SEC gets $20M right off the rip. Having Bama/OU matched up and OM matched up with a G5 team they already smoked once this year it ensures that 2/3 of the weakest teams get through to the next round. If A&M can win in College Station the SEC will have 4 teams in the final 8. That's money directly in their pockets.

The B1G has 3 teams but two teams already in the quarterfinal by virtue of a bye.

Think about it, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. We're constantly told that the SEC is head and shoulders above every other league, they prebake this into preseason rankings so that victories over bad teams like LSU or South Carolina give a boost to the winning team. Then committee rankings come out and reflect this reality and they stack the field with SEC teams, which reinforces the narrative from the preseason and justifies the same narrative next season. Same thing happens on a smaller scale with the B1G. Between the two conferences they have 2/3 of the field.

The current playoff model with a committee is a brand protection and money laundering racket for the two power conferences, the B1G and the SEC. The ACC and B12 are patronized a bit with 1 or two teams.

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