12/09/2025
When Irish eyes aren’t smiling
MIKE BURKE
Allegany Communications Sports
Notre Dame didn’t necessarily get hosed by the decision itself – that it would not be part of the 12-team College Football Playoffs. The Fighting Irish got hosed by the process.
Yes, the process of the weekly ESPN Tuesday-night playoff rankings show did in old Notre Dame; maybe you’ve seen it if you have absolutely nothing to watch on Tuesdays (Is Happy Days still on?).
You see, the committee that arranges the bracket for the CFP presents its official ranking of the contenders each week on ESPN starting in November. And for all five weeks in advance of the announcement of the tournament field, the committee presented Notre Dame as a higher-positioned team than the Miami Hurricanes.
Trouble is, on Sunday afternoon, following a weekend during which neither team played, the committee ranked Miami seventh among at-large candidates and Notre Dame eighth, and thus the Canes were given the playoff berth that Western Civilization had been led to believe belonged to the Fighting Irish.
And brother, are the Fighting Irish fighting mad. So mad, in fact, the Notre Dame team announced later Sunday that it would not play in a bowl game this year.
“The rankings can’t just be musical chairs at some fifth-grade birthday party,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said Monday on the Dan Patrick Show. “They have to mean something. And to me, what happened to us really kind of was alarming.”
Notre Dame played only two high-end opponents this year – Miami and Texas A&M – and lost to both, and since the school insists on remaining independent in football the only way they get into the playoff is with one of the at-large berths.
Notre Dame’s biggest win was against Southern Cal, which the committee ranked at No. 16, and then the Irish beat seven other Power 4 teams with a combined record of 34-50. Miami’s resume was no more impressive as the Canes beat seven Power 4 teams with a combined record of 34-45. But they beat Notre Dame, 27-24, on Labor Day.
Remember back in 1993 when Notre Dame truly did get hosed out of a national championship? The only Irish loss was to a ranked Boston College team on a last-second field goal. Florida State’s only loss was to Notre Dame, yet Florida State was awarded the national championship because everyone wanted head coach Bobby Bowden to finally have one.
As it turned out, ole Bobby would end up with two, but it should have only been one, because the first one was nothing short of larceny. Notre Dame was flat-out robbed.
Lou Hotz, who was the Notre Dame coach at the time, said, “Last year when they named Miami the national champ over us, everybody said it was because they beat us head-to-head, and while I didn’t like it, I understood it. Well, we beat Florida State head-to-head this year, so why doesn’t the same rationale apply now?”
Sadly for Notre Dame, it applies 32 years later.
“We felt like the way BYU performed in their championship game, a second loss to Texas Tech in a similar fashion, was worthy of Miami moving ahead of them in the rankings,” committee chair Hunter Yurachek told ESPN. “And once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungry for with Notre Dame and Miami.
“And you look at those two teams on paper, and they’re almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, their results against their common opponents, but the one metric we had to fall back on again was the head-to-head.”
Whuh? It took three months, including a month of weekly meetings, for the committee to find the most obvious metric there was to find?
Notre Dame is understandably and righteously ticked off, and its ire is likely to be felt by the Atlantic Coast Conference, the conference the Irish call home for many of their sports, but, obviously, not football, as Bevacqua claimed on Dan Patrick that the ACC did “permanent damage” to its relationship with Notre Dame for the way it pushed for Miami to claim a spot in the CFP.
“We were mystified by the actions of the conference to attack their biggest business partner in football and a member of their conference in 24 of our other sports …” Bevacqua said. “They have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame.”
Of course, Notre Dame is not a member of the conference in football, but Miami is.
Sounds like a threat to me, so if the lights are on at Big East Conference headquarters, I would hope that phone call to South Bend, Indiana was placed before Bevacqua was even off the screen with Dan Patrick and the WELCOME BACK mat was put back in front of the door.
As for Notre Dame skipping the bowl, I don’t know what that will prove. Of course, bowls mean very little anymore other than to ESPN, which owns most of them now.
So in that case, good for Notre Dame for not putting any more money into ESPN’s pocket. Those weasels have a bigger hand in more messes than they’d have us believe.
Plus, it wouldn’t hurt to see the ACC feel some much deserved wrath for its two-faced doings through the decades. No wonder they’re a bloody mess.
And this Bevacqua guy at ND? Starting to like him.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communicat…ions. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X
