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SEC Sports
SOUTH BEND, Ind. ā Eleven final thoughts on Notre Dameās CFP selection Sunday gut-punch, which pulled the plug on a season with legitimate national title aspirations.
1. Thereās a lot of blame to go around for Notre Dame being left out of the 12-team College Football Playoff that it helped design. And some of that blame falls on Notre Dame itself. The Irish just wonāt get the first dose.
2. That honor would go to CFP selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek, who was the talking head behind the weekly farce produced by ESPN for the sake of creating faux outrage ā¦ until the outrage became very real on Sunday. Last week, my colleague Bruce Feldman rage-tweeted about the CFP committeeās seeming detachment from logic, although he was less diplomatic in his word choice.
True, it was hard to argue Notre Dame belonged in the last at-large spot, considering Miami won the head-to-head meeting. Instead of crumbling after a couple of midseason losses, the Hurricanes closed on a tear similar to the Irish. And they still had that opening-weekend win. The games needed to matter, which they did. Unless weāre talking about the SEC Championship Game, which apparently didnāt matter at all.
Untethered by logic but armed with data, Yurachek cited Alabama building a 17-0 lead at Auburn, glossing over the fact the Crimson Tide blew that lead. He cited Notre Dameās 70-7 win over Syracuse, missing the factor that margins of victory beyond 24 points arenāt supposed to matter. He couldnāt compare Notre Dame and Miami until he charged the committee members to rewatch their Week 1 game three months after the fact. The committee was making it up as it went along, the Wizard of Oz hoping no one looked behind the curtain. ESPNās Kirk Herbstreit did, calling his networkās dog-and-pony show a āmistake and misleading.ā
Yes, thereās money to be made from these shows. But for the sake of the sport you pay hundreds of millions of dollars to promote, stop serving college football to fans on a trashcan lid and calling it a gourmet meal.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6870734/2025/12/07/college-football-playoff-controversy-notre-dame/
3. ESPN and the CFP reduced Notre Dame to a plot twist in their television show.
Hopefully no one at either place was surprised when Notre Dame opted out of the Pop-Tarts Bowl because of it.
Walking away from the season looks bad on the surface for Notre Dame. Itās taking their golden football and going home. Notre Dame usually gets what it wants, including the full $20 million payout last year for making the title game, money usually given to a schoolās conference. But this is a protest vote against the system more than anything, even if Notre Dame hasnāt articulated that well. All bowl games outside of the CFP are exhibitions devoid of real stakes. They exist only because enough people watch them on ESPN. And now, with Notre Dame sitting out the postseason, fewer will be watching.
Marcus Freeman likes to say āchoose hardā and āchallenge everything.ā At first glance, Notre Dame opting out felt like doing neither. But talk to enough former players, and the opposite may actually true: Pulling a pin on the postseason opt-out grenade would have been harder than going through with the charade of wanting to play in a game where no one wanted to be. The idea of Freeman capping the season by eating a Slamminā Strawberry breakfast treat was a hard pass.
The fact the football careers of a couple dozen players ended on Sunday is collateral damage.
4. Yes, skipping the 15 bowl practices is a negative. Also yes, Freeman and his staff can flip fully to next season, especially when the transfer portal opens on Jan. 2. Because if this snub fuels anything, it has to be using this time to build a better version of Notre Dame for 2026.
5. For the record, the correct order of Notre Dame, Alabama and Miami should have been 9) Miami 10) Notre Dame 11) Alabama. The point of the CFP is not to incentivize playing in conference championship games. And if Yurachek was serious about watching the tape, heād have seen Alabama leaking oil for the past month, scraping by South Carolina and Auburn, never mind those acts of self-immolation against Oklahoma and Georgia.
Never mind Alabamaās own loss on opening weekend, 31-17 to Florida State, which finished 5-7 and in 13th place in the ACC.
Notre Dame rushed for more yards in the SEC Championship Game than Alabama did.
6. Itās hard to know where Notre Dameās relationship with the ACC goes from here, or how much of the pettiness on the part of the conference will be forgotten. The official ACC Football account taking aim at the Irishās resume on X and the ACC Network showing Notre Dame-Miami 13 times last week donāt need to leave scars.
Notre Dameās real concern should be the competence of a conference that allowed its championship game to be played between Virginia and five-loss Duke. The league failed to put in place a system that got Miami to the conference title game, opening the door for James Madison to steal a bid. Thatās strategic mismanagement.
The league could have avoided alienating Notre Dame simply by having the foresight to put guardrails in place to get its best teams to its marquee event. Instead of Notre Dame and Miami in the CFP, the ACC put in place protocols that led to Notre Dame or Miami.
Now the entire Playoff is worse off.
7. But no, Notre Dame doesnāt need to join a conference. Nothing has changed.
How well did joining the Big 12 work out for BYU in Sundayās rankings?
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6869906/2025/12/07/college-football-playoff-snubs-byu-notre-dame/
8. Now for the blame Notre Dame deserves here. Its fundamental misunderstanding of the roster during training camp is part of the story. Notre Dame didnāt know what it had in new starting quarterback CJ Carr when it kicked off against Miami, which is fine, but offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock knew what he had in star running back Jeremiyah Love and still gave him 10 carries while having Carr throw it 30 times. Defensive coordinator Chris Ash knew what Al Golden left behind on defense, only to reconfigure things enough that the players didnāt understand their assignments until a quarter of the season had been played. The growth arc of Notre Dameās season made for an interesting story, but it never forgave the original sins against Miami and Texas A&M.
Of all Freemanās offseason projects, the biggest must be figuring out how to take what he sees in August and translate it into September. Whether itās losing to Marshall or Northern Illinois or whether itās gameplanning for Miami and Texas A&M, Notre Dame canāt afford these kinds of misreads.
Notre Dame likes to say it has the best coaching staff in the country. Maybe thatās true in October and November. But it has to be true on opening night from now on. Notre Dame lost the benefit of the doubt with its 0-2 start. And through all the blowouts of bottom feeders like Arkansas, Purdue, Boston College, Syracuse and Stanford, it never won it back.
9. However, Notre Dameās athletic department failed its football program by giving Freeman Miami and Texas A&M back-to-back to start the season. Youāve probably noticed that no other program opened with two top-15 teams, and thatās because itās asinine to risk the season in early September before the coaching staff can fully understand what it has on the roster and how to use it.
Opening against Texas A&M last year and at Miami this season were calculated risks. They made sense, both the win in College Station and the loss at Coral Gables. But to staple Texas A&M onto this yearās slate immediately after the Miami game was madness. Athletic director Pete Bevacqua regularly credits deputy athletic director Ron Powlus for his scheduling prowess. This yearās team was partially undone by it.
10. Look, I get it. Scheduling is hard, even if Notre Dame likes to claim it has more willing home-and-home partners than it could actually play. Yet the schedules put together by Notre Dame, when accounting for the albatross of five ACC games, plus Navy, USC and at least one ābuy gameā like Rice, have given the football program neither room to grow (see: playing the seasonās two hardest games at the beginning) nor material that can win hearts and minds throughout the fall. Other than the USC game, did anyone pay attention to Notre Dame after Sept. 13?
Even USC in primetime barely moved the needle. More people watched LSU-Vanderbilt that weekend.
A good Notre Dame schedule, especially given the Irish donāt play in a conference championship game, has to be tougher in the regular season than that of other CFP contenders. To get the benefit of the doubt, youāve got to schedule up. But those schedules also have to be paced correctly from start to finish. This yearās slate didnāt do either. Next year? The Irish may end up playing two ranked teams. But theyāll have to wait until November to face Miami and USC.
11. A year ago, Notre Dame played the longest season in school history. Now itās about to embark on the longest and angriest offseason of all time.
It didnāt have to be this way.
