The Notre Dame Fighting Irish will not get the chance to get back to the National Championship this season and finish the job. That opportunity was stolen by the selection committee, especially when the Irish did everything they needed to after losing the first two games of the season.
Not too long after the entire bracket reveal, College Football Playoff selection committee chairman Hunter Yurachek joined the show, and of course, the first thing Rece Davis asked him was about the Notre Dame and Miami switch. Notre Dame had been ranked ahead of Miami in every single CFP ranking, but somehow, when neither team played this weekend, it was now that the two flipped.
Yurachek tried to use the excuse of BYU's performance in the Big 12 Championship being what put the Hurricanes above the Cougars, and then Notre Dame and Miami were right next to each other, and what it came down to was the head-to-head because both teams were just 'too close to each other.'
Here’s College Football Playoff chair Hunter Yurachek’s answer for why Notre Dame vs. Miami’s head-to-head result didn’t matter for five weeks but all of a sudden it did on selection day.
— Tyler Horka (@tbhorka) December 7, 2025
Spoiler: It’s not a good one.
The CFP committee completely contradicted itself all along. pic.twitter.com/EnxrPtZwyZ
“As I mentioned last week in last week’s rankings, we thought Notre Dame was better than BYU and deserved to be ranked higher than BYU,” Yurachek said.
So, BYU, a team that lost only one regular-season game and lost to Texas Tech in the Big 12 Championship, a team they earned a spot in because they were so good, is suddenly worse than a team that wasn't even good enough to make it to the ACC Championship, which ended up being won by a five-loss Duke team?
None of it makes sense and Yurachek trying to explain it just looks like he is talking in circles.
“We thought BYU deserved to be ranked higher than Miami, and that’s the way that laid out," Yurachek said. "After the championship game in the Big 12 with the way BYU performed against Texas Tech, we felt like Miami deserved to be ranked ahead of BYU, and then you had the direct head-to-head comparison of those teams, Miami and Notre Dame, sitting respectively at 10 and 11 in our poll."
Miami has no business being in the College Football Playoff. Notre Dame's losses came by a total of four points, and Miami lost to Louisville and SMU, two teams that aren't even ranked in any of the final rankings. Whatever happened to the quality of losses?
Also, if Yurachek is going to talk about how a team plays in the conference championship, then Alabama shouldn't have been in with how horrible they looked against Georgia in the SEC Championship. The Crimson Tide had -3 rushing yards in that game, and they somehow deserved to be in?
The playoff committee is a joke at this point, and the rankings during the season should be discontinued because, in the end, they don't matter.