The ACC entered Sunday in a precarious position after five-loss Duke claimed the league title in overtime on Saturday. The conference emerged from the College Football Playoff selection show with a sense of relief.
While Duke didn’t make the CFP after its win over Virginia, the ACC was still represented in the bracket, with Miami getting the 10 seed.
Notre Dame was the casualty of Miami being included. The Fighting Irish were the first team left out of the 12-team field.
The CFP committee met until 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning as members debated one of the trickier rankings in event history. The committee didn’t drop Alabama after the Crimson Tide lost to Georgia in the SEC title game, while BYU fell following its conference title game defeat to Texas Tech. That left the Fighting Irish and Hurricanes competing for the final at-large spot.
“You look at those two teams on paper and they’re almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents,” CFP committee chair and University of Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek said during the selection show. “The one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”
Miami beat Notre Dame, 27-24, on Aug. 31 at Hard Rock Stadium.
“I charged the committee members to go back and watch that game,” Yurachek said. “We got some interesting debate from our coaches on what that game looked like … and with that in mind, we gave Miami the nod over Notre Dame.”
Notre Dame was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the sport’s 12-team playoff in its inaugural year last season, earning more than $20 million en route to the national championship game.
Miami rose from No. 18 to No. 10 over the course of the CFP’s weekly rankings process, which began Nov. 4. Some fans and pundits have criticized those shows for creating confusion ahead of the final lineup—the only one that matters.
“[Commitee members] really don’t feel that their rankings are true until they get all of the data in,” ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said during the selection show.
Alabama’s inclusion gives the SEC five playoff teams a year after the conference only qualified three teams, leading to an offseason of concern across the South. Multiple tweaks were made to the system this year.
The CFP staff adjusted its strength of schedule calculations to put more weight on games against top teams and unveiled a new strength of record metric. Alabama’s strength of schedule was cited by Yurachek as a reason for its ranking Sunday.
The four top seeds (and first round byes) also no longer must go to conference champions, allowing Ohio State to finish second after losing to Indiana Saturday. Still, five conference champions are guaranteed admission to the playoff, a rule that is already garnering significant controversy following Notre Dame’s exclusion.
Had Miami made the ACC championship game, a loss would’ve likely knocked them out of playoff consideration, while a win would have given them one of those automatic bids, opening room for another at-large. Duke made its way to Charlotte over Miami thanks to the ACC’s sixth tiebreaker—conference opponent combined winning percentage—in a setback for the Hurricanes that wound up working out.
Two schools from the so-called Group of 5 conferences, Tulane (American) and James Madison (Sun Belt), finished ahead of Duke in the rankings, earning them the No. 11 and No. 12 seeds, respectively, and leaving no room for Notre Dame.
It’s a banner result for the smaller conferences, though one that could ultimately lead to changes to the selection process. Both Tulane and JMU are also set to lose their head coaches to bigger programs as soon as their seasons end.
“I think you have 10 teams that are getting evaluated on one set of criteria in this year’s polling, and you have two teams that are getting in the playoffs evaluated on a whole different set of criteria,” ESPN analyst Nick Saban said.
Colleague Booger McFarland was even more direct. “No one in America aside from JMU or Tulane thinks that JMU or Tulane can win a championship this year,” he said. “But they’re in it because we had to include them based on the parameters we were given, and I think that’s going to rub a lot of people the wrong way. ”
The result also spotlights conference championships’ awkward fit in the current system, particularly given the fact that conference expansion has led to jumbles atop each league’s standings.
ESPN’s Greg McElroy advocated for new conference championship selection procedures—potentially adding computer rankings back to the equation—as a solution. Others have suggested that the league title games’ time has come and gone, with playoff play-in games potentially replacing them on the calendar.
Playoff expansion is also on the table. The CFP board of managers will meet the day before the title game in January to discuss possible changes to the format that could be implemented as soon as 2026, with 16-team and 24-team fields under consideration. Most leaders in the sport are on board with expansion, though disagreement begins when discussing how many teams should qualify automatically and how the others should be chosen.
The current playoff crop is almost two weeks away from returning to the field. The impact of this year’s postseason is already being felt.
“This is a bracket that’s going to be talked about forever,” ESPN commentator Chris Fowler said. “There’s going to be something more than a tweak, I think, going forward.”
