Notre Dame football: 3 reasons the Irish are too low in initial CFP rankings
Notre Dame football: 3 reasons the Irish are too low in initial CFP rankings
Notre Dame Is Better Than Several Unbeaten Teams
One very important thing is to remember that it is not the job of the selection committee to select the four most deserving teams or to rank teams from most deserving to least deserving. It’s their job to rank the teams that are the best from 1-25, based on what they’ve done in the games they’ve played. It’s a flawed and subjective way to go about doing things.
However, it is the way college football currently does things, so it may as well do them properly. There are at least two unbeaten teams ahead of Notre Dame that the Irish are better than.
Wake Forest comes in at number 9, but they’re not that good. For one, their defense isn’t anything special. They also don’t recruit athletes at the same level as anyone else in the top-10 (including Cincinnati), and Notre Dame is littered with more talent than them. That much you can see just by watching the two of them side by side.
Wake Forest also hasn’t played a remotely challenging schedule, which means that they haven’t looked as impressive as a school like Notre Dame against worse competition.
Oklahoma, which is ranked 8th, should have lost to Tulane and Kansas. They got credit for benching the pre-season Heisman frontrunner. Well, where is Brian Kelly’s credit for juggling three quarterbacks and not almost losing to a bad team? Oklahoma’s defense has regressed and on offense, they’ve had to turn to a freshman with a limited grasp on the playbook. They’re not better than the Irish.
Of course, that’s before you consider the one-loss schools like Oregon, Michigan, or even Ohio State. In other words, based on the language of who is best, there are a lot of teams that Notre Dame looks better than who is currently ahead of them in the rankings. There is time for that to change, but it’s still an issue for now.