With Week 5 approaching, it’s officially time to start looking at where teams should end up when the postseason begins. While there are still a ton of games to play before anything is official, On3’s Brett McMurphy believes he’s nailed down where Notre Dame will finish and how far they’ll go. Irish fans shouldn’t be all that happy about either prediction.
Earlier this week, McMurphy released his official bowl game and College Football Playoff predictions. On the one hand, the analyst does at least include good news about the Irish making the CFP. In fact, he ranked them No. 5 in the final CFP poll. Unfortunately, that’s the last of the good news.
Ranking 5th in this poll means that Notre Dame comes up just short of getting a double bye in the 12-team field. Instead, Marcus Freeman and company will host No. 12 Boise State in South Bend to open the playoffs. Unsurprisingly, McMurphy thinks the Golden Domers will take care of business against the Broncos and head to the quarterfinals where they’ll take on No. 4 Miami.
If this prediction comes to pass, it would mean that the Irish and Hurricanes will face each other for the third time in two years. Of course, one of the most interesting twists in this set of projections is that it’s hard to know exactly how Miami and Notre Dame finish 4th and 5th in the CFP poll, precisely because they already play each other this year.
Brett McMurphy projects Notre Dame football to face Miami in CFP quarterfinal
On the one hand, it appears that McMurphy doesn’t believe the loser of the November 7 game will suffer in the polls at all. That would mean whoever does suffer defeat finishes the regular season 11-1. Even if that happens, it still feels unlikely that Notre Dame finishes in the Top 5, given how much heat the program has taken for a less-than-challenging schedule.
Of course, it’s also possible that if the Irish lose to Miami in South Bend this year, they’ll be ranked No. 1 or No. 2 at the time and don’t drop all that far because of how good the ‘Canes are. Of course, if Miami beats the top team in the country, how do they finish No. 4 instead of higher in the rankings?
There's also a chance McMurphy didn’t think hard enough about his rankings and laid out who he thinks are the Top 11 teams, with Boise State as the G6 representative.
The other piece of bad news, if McMurphy is right, is that he believes Notre Dame will lose to the Hurricanes, at least for the second time in two seasons. He then has the hated Hurricanes getting all the way to the National Title Game for the second straight year, falling just short yet again, this time to Georgia.
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