Did Miami move ahead of Notre Dame to make the College Football Playoff at the last minute largely because the Hurricanes started out ranked lower than the Fighting Irish in the first minute — ie. the initial CFP rankings back on Nov. 4? It sure seems that way.
Despite neither team playing on conference championship weekend, Miami jumped two spots from No. 12 to No. 10 to take the final at-large spot in the playoff. That move came at the expense of both BYU and Notre Dame. The Cougars dropped from No. 11 to No. 12 after losing a second time to Texas Tech. And Notre Dame fell one spot to be the first team out of the field.
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On ESPN’s selection show, CFP chairman Hunter Yurachek said the committee hadn’t compared Miami and Notre Dame side-by-side until just before the final rankings. The Hurricanes and Fighting Irish finished with the same 10-2 record and Miami beat Notre Dame in Week 1.
That head-to-head win apparently never was considered by the committee until BYU lost on Saturday in the Big 12 title game.
“The first in that was we felt like the way BYU performed in their championship game, a second loss to Texas Tech in a similar fashion was worthy of Miami moving ahead of them in the rankings,” Yurachek said. “And once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungry for of Notre Dame and Miami and you look at those two teams on paper and they’re almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, their results against their common opponents but the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”
Miami beat Notre Dame in Week 2 but was ranked behind the Irish all season. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images)
(Megan Briggs via Getty Images)
When pressed about the committee’s ranking process by ESPN host Rece Davis, Yurachek cited Miami’s starting position in the rankings as to why the committee waited so long to compare Notre Dame and Miami.
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“Rece, if you recall, Miami was a loser of two of three when they entered [the first set of rankings on Nov. 4] at No. 18,” Yurachek said. “And they were in close proximity to Louisville at the time, who I believe was below them in 21st or 22nd spot and we didn’t use the head-to-head metric to compare Miami and Louisville, Louisville a team that had beaten Miami.
“But not until they really got in close proximity, side-by-side with the move with BYU were we able to evaluate just those two teams side-by-side. We always had someone between them. That was previously Alabama and BYU and then just BYU in the last week.”
Based on Yurachek’s explanation, Notre Dame was stunned on Sunday in large part because it had been in the top 10 in every set of rankings the committee released.
Over the six sets of weekly rankings put out by the committee ahead of Sunday’s final reveal, Notre Dame was either 10th or ninth. Miami, meanwhile, worked its way from 18th to 15th, to 13th before two weeks at No. 12 before moving to No. 10 and ahead of Notre Dame.
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Neither team lost a game in the weeks the committee did its rankings. And both teams played five games in November. Had Miami started closer to Notre Dame in the initial set of rankings, the committee plausibly would have moved the Hurricanes ahead of Notre Dame earlier in the season and potentially brought Miami’s 27-24 week 1 win into play earlier.
“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 and we thought BYU deserved to be ranked higher than Miami, which is the way that laid out,” Yurachek said. “After the championship game in the Big 12 and the way that BYU performed again against Texas Tech, we felt 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 No. 10 and 11 in our poll.”
The committee’s rankings process is complicated and does involve a pod system of sorts, where the members of the group evaluate separate pools of teams they believe are relative equals before compiling a top 25. However, if Yurachek’s answers are to be believed, they expose a flaw within the committee’s ranking process that needs to be corrected ahead of next season.
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There’s no reason for the committee to wait until a week after teams’ seasons are over to evaluate them side-by-side. And one or two teams in between two teams with identical records and a head-to-head result should not preclude that head-to-head matchup from being considered.
Teams should not have needed to be directly next to each other in the rankings for head-to-head to matter. After all, it’s the first tiebreaker for every conference when determining a conference championship participant.
Taking Miami over Notre Dame because of Miami’s win is by far the simplest way to justify the Hurricanes’ inclusion in the 12-team field even if you think Notre Dame is now a better team. But waiting until the first weekend of December to consider a game from the last weekend of August is an illogical process.