By MARK LONG
Despite winning every game for nearly three months, No. 9 Notre Dame dropped a spot in the final College Football Playoff rankings Sunday and was left out of the 12-team bracket entirely.
It was a hard fall from the couch.
The Fighting Irish, which won its last 10 games by an average of nearly 30 points, watched championship weekend from afar, idle as an independent with no options to impress the selection committee one last time in a league title game.
It surely will prompt cries of injustice from coast to coast, with the loudest of those coming from South Bend, Indiana. Athletic director Pete Bevacqua and coach Marcus Freeman had taken the high road in recent weeks, avoiding too much lobbying and believing their winning streak would be enough to earn a berth over Alabama.
Miami (10-2) ended up knocking the Irish (10-2) out.
With BYU losing to Texas Tech in the Big 12 title game, the committee ranked Miami and Notre Dame next to each other and turned to the head-to-head metric to determine which one would get the No. 10 seed.
It was Miami, which beat Notre Dame 27-24 in Week 1 of the regular season.
The Hurricanes will play at Texas A&M in the opening round of the playoff. The Irish reportedly declined an invitation to the Pop Tarts Bowl and will not play again this season.
No. 12 BYU, No. 13 Vanderbilt and No. 14 Texas — and, to a lesser extent, Atlantic Coast Conference champion Duke — are sure to have issues with the final CFP standings, too.
But no one has a bigger gripe than Notre Dame, which dropped one spot after beating Stanford 49-20 and then fell another while not playing.
Fans online already started demanding the Irish boycott their bowl game, cancel their scheduling agreement with the ACC and reassess future slates. Some called for Bevacqua to be fired.
Notre Dame lost consecutive games to open the season against teams that made the playoff — Miami and Texas A&M, by a combined four points — and has been as good as anyone in the country since.
Alabama, meanwhile, became the first three-loss team to make the CFP field. Selection committee chairman Hunter Yurachek explained the logic after the Crimson Tide lost 28-7 to Georgia in the SEC championship game.
“Their strength of schedule was the highest in the top 11, and (it) felt like in spite of their performance yesterday in the conference championship, they deserve to stay within that nine spot,” he said.
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