On Sunday, December 7th at 12:00pm EST, the NCAA Division 1 college football playoff committee released the official playoff bracket, and it created chaos.
Notre Dame ‘who was previously ranked at #9’ was bumped from the 12 team playoff. Notre Dame and its fans are livid and decided to “take their ball and go home.” (Sports Illustrated).
Notre Dame is now refusing to play in a bowl game because of the committee voting them out. Because of this, college football fans around the country are referring to Notre Dame as “soft” and “pathetic” due to their decision to withdraw from the games. The Miami Hurricane News paper wrote, “Notre Dame’s bowl game snub is soft and cowardly.” Barstool sports wrote in a recent article, “I would be ashamed to be a Notre Dame fan right now.”
Adding to that controversial news was Miami sneaking into the bracket replacing the previous #9 seed, Notre Dame. Notre Dame fans of course are infuriated by this, claiming they were the higher ranked team. However, the stats were in Miami’s favor which ultimately led to Notre Dame getting booted from the playoffs.
Miami beat Notre Dame head to head in week one of the season. This was the biggest argument the committee faced for this decision. Secondly, Miami had a stronger strength of schedule and beat three of the team’s four common opponents by significantly more than Notre Dame did. The committee could not justify putting Notre Dame in over the Hurricanes after they had seen them play and watched Miami win.
Alabama barely held onto the top 12 after losing badly to the Georgia Bulldogs in the SEC championship. Technically conference championship games should not be considered in the committee’s decision, yet many believed this performance by Alabama was too hard to overlook.
Pat Forde, a writer for Sports Illustrated stated, “The committee took care of the Crimson Tide to a remarkable degree in its last two rankings, strangely moving them up a spot to No. 9 after a sluggish victory over 5–7 Auburn, and then not dropping them at all following the 21-point loss to the Bulldogs.” He hinted at how the committee has been too nice to Alabama, leading some college football fans to think they may be biased towards Alabama because of their domination in previous years.
The last discrepancy with the release of the playoff bracket is with the format that is used by the NCAA. The NCAA guarantees that two groups of five teams are included in the 12 team playoff bracket regardless of their ranking in the FBS. The group of five teams include any team in the FBS outside of the SEC, BIG 10, ACC, or BIG 12. This cleared the path for Tulane and JMU to sneak into the bracket.
Tulane, who played two power four teams this season in Ole Miss and Duke, lost to Ole Miss by 40 and barely squeezed by Duke who is 8-5 and nowhere near the top 25. JMU’s resume was no better, only playing one power four team and losing by two touchdowns to unranked Louisville. This left people to wonder, do these teams really deserve bids over #9 Notre Dame, #12 BYU and #14 Texas who beat #12 vanderbilt, #7 Texas A&M and only lost to #2 Ohio State by a single score.
