Make it make sense.
You can’t.
The College Football Playoff Committee repeatedly said there was a tight debate between who was better; Notre Dame or Alabama. It was so close that the teams actually flip-flopped for seemingly no reason last week.
Somehow, Alabama losing an additional game resulted in the Committee thinking worse of Notre Dame than Alabama. It’s literally nonsensical.
For two weeks, Notre Dame and Miami were compared in the “same tier,” and the Committee affirmed that even after factoring in the teams’ head-to-head matchup at the beginning of the season, the Irish were still ahead of the Hurricanes.
But somehow, removing one team from that “tier” resulted in that head-to-head matchup all of a sudden becoming even more significant.
Make it make sense.
You can’t.
Well, you probably can, actually.
But that will require you to completely ignore everything the College Football Playoff Committee has said, which ironically helps you understand exactly what they did.
In short, the Committee engineered the outcome it wanted all along even when it appeared circumstances required a brazenness that would make it impossible for them to do so.
Every fan thinks everybody else is out to get its school. Every fan is convinced ESPN is biased against its team. Every fan thinks other schools that complain about everything being against them are actually the schools that have everything slanted in their favor.
Like most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Just like fans, there are some commentators and influencers that favor one school over another and there are some commentators and influencers who do the inverse. Each school has its own advantages and disadvantages and oftentimes those perceived advantages can be used against it and become a perceived disadvantage.
True fans are emotionally tied to it so strongly that they rarely can be objective.
Notre Dame fans can often sound like conspiracy theorists.
As much as Irish fans embrace all of the things that make Notre Dame special - the faith aspect of the school, being an Independent, being the premier brand in the sport - they also believe an outsized portion of the College Football world resents their school for those same reasons and will find any way they can to stick it to Notre Dame.
Whatever you thought of that outlook prior to Sunday’s release of the final set of College Football Playoff Rankings, to me, it is now clear the Deep State exists and will find any way it can to stick it to the Irish.
Listening to national broadcasters and pundits try to make an impossible argument look effortless all weekend was alarming. It’s simply not a logical conclusion to arrive at and yet, one commentator after another tried to make the absurd sound obvious.
I understand people have a wide range of opinions on these things, but the consistency with which these people were volunteering to twist themselves into logical pretzels by ignoring and/or shading facts didn’t appear accidental.
It didn’t seem like they were trying to influence the committee either. No, it seemed like they knew what was going to happen.
The Committee had a choice it probably didn’t want to make, but was forced to.
- Leave out a team based on losing the SEC Championship
- Leave out every team from a “Power 4” Conference
- Cherry-pick which games this week mattered and which games didn’t and flip-flop two teams that didn’t play in order to avoid choosing one of the first two options.
For the last month, the Committee was trying so hard not to offend anybody, but in the end, they had to give somebody the short stick and they picked the Irish.
The results of these rankings will be a stain on the sport that won’t go away. This isn’t like choosing between the 68th and 69th best team for the NCAA Tournament. Notre Dame was a legitimate threat to win the national title.
Even when their inclusion in the Field was in doubt, the Irish (+800) were priced as the team with the fourth-best chance to win the championship; behind only Ohio State (+240), Indiana (+310) and Georgia (+700); and well ahead of Alabama (+3300) and Miami (+6500).
How does a team win in dominant fashion then fall behind another team that wins in objectively less than dominant fashion against a similar quality opponent? How does one team get credit for losing a game while another is penalized for not losing a game?
Make it make sense.
I can.
The fix was in all along.
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Notre Dame Fighting Irish 46" Nutcracker Leaner
