Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua called for significant change to the College Football Playoff selection process after his school was excluded from the field in bizarre circumstances.
The Miami Hurricanes jumped ahead of Notre Dame in Sunday’s final rankings, even though the Fighting Irish had consistently ranked higher in the weekly rankings released up until then. That led Bevacqua to accuse the selection committee of putting Notre Dame players through “false emotions” by making them believe they had more of a chance to make the field than they evidently did.
“There is no explanation that could possibly be given to explain the outcome,” Bevacqua told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports. “As I said to Marcus (Freeman), one thing is for sure: Any rankings or show prior to this last one is an absolute joke and a waste of time. Why put these young student-athletes through these false emotions just to pull the rug out from underneath them having not played a game in two weeks and then a group of people in a room shatter their dreams without explanation?”
Bevacqua said he felt the playoff had been “stolen” from the team, and questioned the purpose of previous ranking shows when they seemed to have been meaningless.
“If the rankings shows are legitimate, there is no logical explanation of what happened to us,” Bevacqua said. “Have one ranking show at the end, like Sunday. What’s the point of doing anything prior to that?”
That is a question many will be asking, since Notre Dame came into the weekend ranked 10th with Miami ranked 12th. Neither team played over the weekend, so the Hurricanes leapfrogged Notre Dame for no apparent reason. Selection committee chairman Hunter Yurachek offered a fairly ridiculous explanation for why that happened.
Notre Dame lost head-to-head to Miami 27-24 in their season opener, a result that weighed heavily on the final ranking. The Fighting Irish would likely be a little bit less upset if the committee had not spent the last several weeks implying that result did not matter that much.
