If you want someone to blame for Notre Dame missing the College Football Playoff, Chris Ash is probably your guy. The defense pulled it together as the season went on, but even a C+ performance against Texas A&M would have left this out of the committee’s hands. Was the committee’s logic inconsistent? Yes. But Notre Dame had a chance to handle business on its own.
This would have felt different if the committee had always ranked us back around Utah and Vanderbilt. There would have been disagreement, but today wouldn’t have become such a gut punch. Notre Dame fans are mad for a few reasons, but the justifiable reason is that the committee said Notre Dame and Alabama were extremely close, the committee allowed BYU to drop in the rankings after a conference championship blowout, and the committee did not drop Alabama after a similar whooping. Alabama has a terrible loss on its résumé, but Alabama making the playoff ahead of Notre Dame isn’t insane. They had a better SOR. They beat a top-five team on the road. Miami making the playoff at all is a little wild, given their two losses to mediocre teams, but if it were BYU in there ahead of us, it’d be hard to quarrel. It’s not that we missed the playoff. It’s how the committee got there.
There’s a lot to take away from this committee’s decision and from the noise that surrounded it. But just because a lot can be learned doesn’t mean Notre Dame should drastically change its approach. The situation’s a lot simpler than the decision the committee made this morning. The solution to missing the playoff is not to whine, and it’s not to bow to the pressures of the industry. The solution to missing the playoff is to get better at football. The problem for this Notre Dame team was that it wasn’t ready to play championship-caliber football when championship-caliber football needed to be played.
Addressing the bogeymen, and then a look at next year:
Conference Membership Helps Playoff Selection. It Still Isn’t Worth It.
Two things that probably hurt Notre Dame this weekend were committee members’ fear of Greg Sankey and committee members’ denial about how uncompetitive the ACC has become. I don’t know any of this for sure, but it’s hard to find a better explanation for what happened. SEC and ACC interests were present in the room. Notre Dame interests were not.
At the end of the day, whatever. These administrators can be a cowardly sort, but they let Notre Dame in last year with a loss to NIU. We’re not at risk of missing a playoff we undeniably deserve to make. It’s worth talking about the ACC angle, though. Because technically, we’re a member of the ACC.
Once upon a time, our semi-membership in the ACC was helpful. It gave us quality competition in the non-football sports, it gave us some fresh football matchups, and it filled out our schedule with novelty, even if it cost us games against rivals like Michigan State. It was a great deal when we made it, one that made continued independence easier. Now, it’s making independence harder. The quality of football in the ACC has dried up. The quality of men’s basketball is severely worse. Our fellow ACC schools are, collectively, a mess, to the point where the last big playoff blowup led to legal action between those universities.
If we’re allowed one overreaction to today, it’s this:
It’s time to leave the ACC.
I don’t know exactly what this would mean for non-football sports. But when the Big Ten’s TV deal expires in 2030 and sets off the next round of realignment, I hope we bid the ACC farewell. It was a good run. We had some great times together. But we don’t want them, and by the looks of their media campaign to keep us out of the playoff, they don’t want us. (The campaign’s goal was to get Miami in, but one plus one does equal two.)
Where would we go for sports other than football?
The Big Ten can never be an option. Historically, they tried to kill us. In the present day, their commissioner seems bent on killing college sports as a whole. Those schools hire poor leadership.
I doubt the SEC would allow us to join as a non-football member, but it would be the ideal destination if Greg Sankey’s eventual successor is a comparable figure to Greg Sankey. No matter what you think of the guy, no conference better supports its members’ long-term interests than the SEC.
The Big 12 will do just about anything for money, and we could do worse in terms of travel than flying between Morgantown and Tucson. Rejoining the Big East could also work.
If we’re allowed one pipe dream, though, it’s this:
Michigan’s upset with the Big Ten. USC’s upset with the Big Ten. Ohio State knows it’s worth more than the Big Ten. Penn State will follow Ohio State and Michigan to the ends of the earth. Stanford will follow where we lead. Cal will go with Stanford. UNC probably doesn’t actually want to leave Duke, but UNC wants the money it’s capable of earning.
Why not try to convince other schools to go independent with us, forming a non-football conference with agreements to play each other as necessary to fill out football schedules? We’ve got a few years. The benefits are obvious. It’s worth making the calls, and it might help reverse the unfortunate tide of more and more power being concentrated in the hands of a few special interests.
Speaking of which…*eyes narrow*…Herbstreit.
ESPN Connections Help Playoff Selection. We Can Do a Little About That.
To reiterate: We should not be whining. We’re not at risk of missing a playoff we undeniably deserve to make. We didn’t manage a top-12 SOR. We lost at home to a team whose defense is even worse than ours was. We lost to Miami, a team we knew had a good chance to end up around the playoff bubble.
But if you’re a conspiracy theorist who thinks ESPN is determining the College Football Playoff field, I mean, it sure looked like that today.
Here’s my best attempt to describe how that actually works:
- Most big football games are played on ESPN.
- College Gameday is on ESPN.
- The CFP Rankings Shows are on ESPN.
- Thanks to 1, 2, and 3, ESPN personalities get the opening word in the college football narrative. They don’t dictate the whole conversation, but they kick it off, and they get a lot of airtime to make their case.
- Thanks to 1 and 2 especially, ESPN personalities speak directly to the committee members with a frequency unmatched at FOX, NBC, or CBS. The committee might not hear everybody’s opinions, but it hears theirs.
- When it comes to opinions, there’s strength in numbers. If a lot of people say something, it becomes normalized. If an ESPN personality say that BYU should drop with a blowout loss but Alabama shouldn’t, the committee doesn’t have to say it themselves. They’ve got a talking head blocking for them, and even if they didn’t originally agree with the opinion shared, there’s a piece of them that wonders if the ESPN opinion is right and theirs is wrong.
- ESPN personalities cover a lot of SEC and ACC games. They’ve covered these games for a long time. During that time, they’ve covered some really good teams. Since Kirk Herbstreit joined College Gameday, current SEC and ACC programs have won 78% of national championships (22.5 of a possible 29). Of course Herbstreit has an inflated view of this year’s Alabama team. He works with Nick Saban. Herbstreit doesn’t have to be nefarious to be biased.
- Even if ESPN personalities do operate with the best intentions in the world (I don’t know if they do or don’t, but to err on the safe side, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt), ESPN executives benefit from getting more SEC and ACC teams into the playoff. It’s good for business. It keeps Greg Sankey happy and it might help keep the ACC alive. It’s no secret that ESPN is struggling. It’s no secret that TV is a slimy business.
- Thanks to 8, there are no guardrails on 6 or 7. There’s no editor or producer moderating the takes.
It’s subtle, but it’s impactful. No one had a problem with conference championship losers dropping in the rankings back in the 2010’s. The committee established early this cycle that Notre Dame was a better team with a better résumé than Miami. Then came a bombardment of messaging that Miami should be in and Alabama shouldn’t drop. Groupthink went off the rails. Here we are.
If we want to address this vulnerability, more road games against great SEC, ACC, and Big 12 teams can at least somewhat help. Kirk Herbstreit wouldn’t ignore us if he broadcast more Notre Dame games. It’s good that we’re visiting Texas in 2029 and Alabama in 2030. But I wish we were playing those games sooner. The more familiar we can make ESPN with our program, the better for our treatment in the media. Silly? So silly. But it can’t hurt, and big games are fun. Big games are the point of college football.
Marcus Freeman and the NFL
Pivoting to next year: We should be at least a little bit worried about Marcus Freeman leaving for an NFL job. The guy is raising a big family. Coaching in the NFL is an easier lifestyle than coaching college football. The highest-paid NFL coaches are paid more than the highest-paid college coaches. There are always NFL jobs open, and Marcus Freeman is a great leader of men. Hopefully, this becomes a non-story, but it’s the biggest threat to Notre Dame football right now. Conferences and committees and a TV channel can marginally affect our playoff chances. Marcus Freeman is the reason a national championship is believable again.
Thankfully, our athletic department seems to be in capable, competent hands. Few things will make you appreciate the Swarbrick and now Bevacqua administration like watching Penn State conduct a coaching search. Marcus Freeman seems to have the resources he needs. No one seems to doubt that he deserves every dollar he can get. And in the absolute doomsday scenario, the one where Freeman does move on, we at least have finally built an NIL apparatus that can once again recruit 5-stars to South Bend.
Hopefully he stays put. Forever.
But this is the threat this offseason.
Next Year
Finally, looking at something positive.
We only had two 5-stars on this year’s roster. We just signed four more. That should continue. Sign four 5-stars a year, and you can build a national championship-caliber roster. We might not be there yet, but we’re finally on our way.
More immediately, unless we underachieve, we’re going to be favored to win every game on our 2026 schedule. That schedule might be a little weak—there’s a believable scenario where we finish 0–0 against ranked competition—which means we might need to go 11–1. But the goal at this point is 12–0 anyway. Let’s think 12–0 until it’s time to think 1–0.
At this point, the big games are:
- Sunday, September 6th: Wisconsin at Lambeau Field
- TBD: USC at Somewhere, Assuming It Does Happen
- Saturday, November 7th: Miami at Notre Dame Stadium
- TBD: SMU at Notre Dame Stadium
There are other games. Rivalry games:
- Saturday, September 19th: Michigan State at Notre Dame Stadium
- Saturday, September 26th: Purdue in West Lafayette
- TBD: Stanford at Notre Dame Stadium
- Saturday, October 31st: Navy in Foxborough, Massachusetts
- Saturday, November 21st: Boston College at Notre Dame Stadium
Finally, we play Rice at home, UNC on the road, and Syracuse on the road. Plus potentially someone in place of USC, should America lose that game of chicken. It’s a fun slate. Hopefully it features some good teams. Hopefully it turns into a revenge tour.
There’ll be time to talk about who’s leaving and who’s coming back, both on the roster and the coaching staff. In the meantime, a little breaking news (at least for me, as I sit here writing this):
We’re Opting Out of a Bowl Game
This is disappointing. Really disappointing. If we didn’t want to play in the Pop-Tarts Bowl, we shouldn’t have lost to Texas A&M.
I’m curious what the context is here, but I have a hard time believing we wouldn’t be able to field the roster necessary to play a competitive game, given how many players we’re set to return. If we’re trying to prove some kind of point…again, the way to prove that point would have been to beat Texas A&M. Or to go win the Pop-Tarts Bowl by four touchdowns. Bowl games, even goofy ones, are historic and sacred. Skipping one is entitled and embarrassing. Football teams play football. And it’s not like these games are without benefit. Does Steve Angeli get us points in the Orange Bowl if Steve Angeli doesn’t get all those reps in the Sun Bowl a year earlier? Maybe, but the Sun Bowl dominance couldn’t have hurt.
The offseason’s underway. Next season’s approaching. It should be a good one. But this winter’s off to a bad start, and we just made it worse.
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