On live national television, Notre Dame was humiliated in front of millions.
Sitting idly in their team facility, all they could do was watch as the College Football Playoff Selection Committee left the Fighting Irish as the “first team out” of the 12-team bracket. Despite being ahead of Miami in the previous five rankings, the Hurricanes vaulted in front of Notre Dame for the final at-large spot with the No. 10 seed.
South Bend was stunned.
Neither Notre Dame or Miami played a game over this weekend, yet the committee switched the teams on the last day after failing to do so for the last month, pulling the rug out from underneath the Irish at the last second.
And then came the bombshell.
In an unprecedented decision, Notre Dame announced they would be withdrawing from bowl game consideration and calling it quits on the 2025 college football season. But how can you blame them?
Although Notre Dame was wrong to bail on their season so disgracefully, the greater evil is the Selection Committee, which botched the ranking process and misled the Irish for over a month.
While the decision to include Miami and leave Notre Dame out was the correct one, the committee’s utter inability to show even a baseline consistency in their week-to-week judgements triggered the total meltdown by ND that the rest of the college football world now has to deal with.
Is abandoning the season before it’s over one of the softest things a team could possibly do? Yes.
Does it make them look like crybabies and whiny losers to the rest of college football for blatantly giving up when they don’t get everything they want for once? Yup.
Does it sabotage the young and overlooked players on their roster who are now denied their last chance of showcasing their talents on the field to prove they deserve a spot on the team for 2026? Sure does.
Is the committee completely justified in putting Miami above Notre Dame with both teams having almost identical résumés and the Hurricanes beating them head-to-head earlier in the season? Absolutely.
Running away from a bowl game is indefensible on a competitive level and the Irish deserve every joke that will be made at their expense. But, it doesn’t change the fact that the committee carried out procedural malpractice for weeks, setting false expectations with its own rankings and then reversing course without any reasonable explanation.
Notre Dame’s scorched-earth stance is the raw reaction of a program blindsided by a group of “experts” that couldn’t maintain its own standards, let alone justify a last-minute flip that contradicted a month of its own evaluations.
From their viewpoint, the Irish were used as a pawn in ESPN’s circus of a weekly CFP selection show that was nothing but a “farce and total waste of time,” according to ND athletic director Pete Bevacqua.
Ironically, all of this outrage comes despite the fact that the correct decision was ultimately made to leave Notre Dame out of the College Football Playoff.
But it was the despicably bad process by the committee along the way to this outcome that had led them astray since Nov. 4, giving them deceptive hope and leaving its fanbase rightfully upset.
This fallout could have been avoided entirely if the committee had done the right thing from the start and ranked Miami ahead of Notre Dame weeks ago. The head-to-head criteria had been in place since the weekly rankings began, explicitly outlined in their own bylaws as one of the most important factors to consider when comparing two teams.
All the committee needed to do was simply follow its own rules, yet it chose to completely disregard the guidelines.
The CFP committee finally came to its senses and recognized its mistake just hours before the final selection show, but by then it was far too late. Nothing it could say would be able to sufficiently rationalize why the members decided to change their minds so late when the decisive data point had been laid out in front of them from the beginning.
Thus, when Selection Committee Chair Hunter Yurachek was pressed to explain why he and his members waited so unforgivably long to flip Notre Dame and Miami, instead of doing it from the outset to avoid controversy, his answer was pathetic.
All he could say was that they were incapable of factoring in the head-to-head result until BYU were blown out of the Big 12 Championship, allowing the two teams to finally be compared with one another because they were now side-by-side in the rankings.
A laughable excuse that directly contradicted his statement from several weeks earlier, when Yurachek told ESPN they would be compared as soon as they were seeded within the same cluster of four teams. Not to mention they had already set the precedent of head-to-head being a valuable metric when placing 9-3 Texas over 10-2 Vanderbilt the week prior because the Longhorns had beaten them on Nov. 1.
That inconsistency was precisely what made this disaster inevitable. Had the CFP committee used common sense and slotted Miami ahead of Notre Dame weeks ago, the Irish would almost certainly be preparing to play in a bowl game right now.
Instead, the panel spent an entire month signaling that they were safely in the field only to yank that assurance away and pull the plug at the finish line.
Yes, Notre Dame’s decision to quit on their 2025 season was soft, petty, embarrassing and downright cowardly for such a self-righteous program that postures itself as morally and fundamentally superior to every other team and treats the rest of college football like it’s beneath them.
But, like it or not, it’s the predictable result when the governing body mismanages the process so badly and categorically destroys all their credibility by going back on their word to banish one of the odds-on favorites to win the national championship from the playoffs altogether.
Actions have consequences, and this one falls squarely on the committee. They created this mess, and now everyone else is left to clean up the chaos they unleashed.