College Football Playoff committee sparks frenzied debate as Notre Dame kept out of final field

Notre Dame ended the regular season with a 10-2 record and ranked No. 10 in the penultimate College Football Playoff rankings going into conference championship weekend.

The Fighting Irish didn’t play over the weekend as the football program is not a part of any conference. Notre Dame was in the field over BYU and Miami with college football fans clamoring for the Hurricanes to get into the field given their win over the Fighting Irish in the regular season.

On Sunday, the College Football Playoff Committee chose to keep the Fighting Irish out of the field. Miami made the College Football Playoff, as did Alabama despite having three losses. The Tulane Green Wave and James Madison Dukes also made the final field as being the best teams to win their conference championships. The Duke Blue Devils won the ACC, but were held out of the field with five losses on their resume.

The college football world weighed in on Notre Dame being left out.

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CFP Committee Chair Hunter Yurachek said the committee decided to jump Miami over BYU after the Cougars lost in the Big 12 Championship to the Texas Tech Red Raiders. It was BYU’s second loss to Texas Tech during the season.

Then, Yurachek said the committee did a side-by-side comparison between Notre Dame and Miami and decided to keep the Fighting Irish out of the bracket.

“You look at those two teams on paper and they were almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents, but the one metric we had to fall back on was the head-to-head,” Yurachek said on ESPN. “I charged the committee members to go back and watch that game because it was so far back and we got some interesting debate from our coaches on what that game looked like.

“With that in mind, we gave Miami the nod over Notre Dame into that 10 spot.”

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Yurachek said that the committee felt that Miami should have been ranked ahead of BYU after the Cougars’ performance in the Big 12 title game and then the committee compared the Hurricanes with the Fighting Irish.

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