With the penultimate release of the College Football Playoffs bracket, Notre Dame football fans got some excellent news and some terrible news on Tuesday night. The excellent news? Miami is still sitting at No. 12 in the rankings. That should be good news and in years past would have locked them out of the playoffs. However...
The bad news? The Blue and Gold dropped a spot, despite absolutely crushing its final opponent of the regular season. That drop, makes things quite a bit scarier as the final weekend of the regular season approaches.
Notre Dame now sits at the No. 10 team, and that is unofficially the absolute last spot an at-large team can sit at with the way the other conferences, including the G6 champ, shake out.
CFP committee’s latest decisions leave Notre Dame clinging to a spot
The Irish playoff hopes are now dangling by a thread despite doing everything the CFP committee has essentially been saying they need to do. Meanwhile, Alabama, who had to hold off a late rally to overcome 5-7 Auburn jumped over the Irish to the No. 9 seed.
If that wasn't odd enough, the committee also boosted Ole Miss up one spot despite losing its head coach, Lane Kiffin.
Adding insult to injury. During his interview with ESPN, committee chair Hunter Yurachek made it clear that idle teams can move up or down depending on how conference championships affect a team's "strength of schedule."
In other words, somehow, the CFP chair left the door open for Miami, who played neither Virginia or Duke this year, could move up depending on how the ACC championship game plays out. How would that be justified? There doesn't appear a clear path.
The bottom line, heading into Selection Sunday is that Notre Dame, as it stands now, would make the playoffs and get a rematch against Texas A&M at Kyle Field. But it feels like the committee is looking for a reason to bump the Irish out entirely.