By JOHN MOOREHOUSE
The reveal of the 12-team College Football Playoff bracket was a big ol’ mess.
And that’s exactly how the power brokers in the sport want it.
How else do you explain what went down on Sunday?
How else do you justify Alabama getting spanked by Georgia and yet holding steady in the ninth overall spot?
How else do you justify Miami leapfrogging Notre Dame after both were idle this past Saturday?
Watching the selection show on ESPN provided a host of different reactions.
Chris Fowler said the 2025 bracket “was going to be discussed forever.” Or, at least, until the committee changes the rules again on who gets included and how seeding gets determined.
Rece Davis rightly grilled selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek about the Miami-Notre Dame switcheroo. Then again, perhaps Yurachek’s head was still spinning, considering he’s the athletic director at Arkansas, after the Hogs got spurned by Alex Golesh in a play for more leverage at his new gig at Auburn.
Then there’s Nick Saban, whose contempt for the Group of 5 teams was so obvious you would think he was filming another commercial for his fictional Airbnb rental and Tulane or James Madison showed up as the next tenants.
The brackets got released during the noon hour on Sunday — got to get the business done before NFL kickoffs! — but the talking heads were analyzing and dissecting all the live long day. The truth is, Alabama, Miami, and Notre Dame all had their flaws as candidates for the playoff.
Sure, Bama was the metrics’ darling — no other team in the nation finished in the top 10 in the Football Power Index (FPI), strength of schedule, and strength of record simultaneously. The Tide also lost three games, two of their last three, limped past Auburn in the regular-season finale, and got thoroughly pounded in Week 1 by a Florida State team that turned out to be dreadful. Those who advocate for Alabama say it would be unfair to punish the Tide for losing a conference championship, but then again, BYU dropped a spot in the rankings after getting boatraced by Texas Tech in the Big 12 title affair.
Miami is in, and really should have been all along. The Hurricanes did lose a couple of games they shouldn’t have, neither of which was Carson Beck’s fault (just ask him; he’ll tell you himself). Miami also went 4-0 against ranked opponents, including a Week 1 victory over Notre Dame. That head-to-head win was used as the main justification for the ‘Canes being in and the Irish being out, which would make much more sense had Notre Dame not ranked ahead of Miami consistently up until the final rankings.
Notre Dame lost both of its first two games, albeit to Miami and Texas A&M, which went 11-1 and also made the playoff as an at-large. Notre Dame reeled off 10 straight wins, six of them blowouts (decided by 28 or more points) including victories over two ranked foes: Southern Cal and Pitt. I asked my pal John Brice, who covers Notre Dame semi-regularly for Football Scoop what the reaction was in South Bend. One word: “Furor.”
“Notre Dame people, fairly understandably, believe that the Fighting Irish program was robbed of its chance to make a return run to the CFP Championship game,” Brice told I-81 Sports.
Looking for some measure of retribution, the Irish announced on Sunday afternoon they’d be skipping bowl season altogether after the snub. So petty you could call them Tom.
It’s difficult to understand the reasoning behind who got chosen and the seeding. It wasn’t about choosing the best teams. It wasn’t about choosing the most deserving teams. It also wasn’t about producing the most entertaining matchups; two of the four first-round games are rematches from the regular season and, in one of those, Ole Miss beat Tulane by five touchdowns.
My opinion? The committee was terrified of slighting the SEC by placing four teams (the horror!) instead of five in the field, and felt pressured to lift Miami over Notre Dame after Duke played spoiler in the ACC championship game.
I’m not the only one that thinks that way about Miami.
“While last year I disagreed with some of the seeds, I thought the CFP Committee got the overall field correct. Hard to think that this year,” Brice wrote. “Hard not to think that Duke’s win in the ACC Championship is what ultimately denied Notre Dame a bid.
“The Fighting Irish are one powerful brand in college football; the ACC is 17 other teams. That’s it. That’s the difference.”
And so, the final decisions on the CFP bracket are just going to be used to lobby for changes the next year or in the next cycle. Same as it ever was… and everyone thinks they have the answer. Expansion won’t do anything to fix the situation. Move to a 16-team bracket and, instead of debating over who gets in as the ninth and 10th seeds, we’ll be clutching our pearls and shaking our fists over who gets chosen 13th and 14th. Conference champions should matter, except when they shouldn’t. Same goes for making a conference title game. Kirk Herbstreit seems to think a 16-team bracket will mean less politicking — Kalen DeBoer, Mario Cristobal, Steve Sarkisian, and Marcus Freeman sounded more like politicians running for office than coaches in the past couple of weeks as they “made their case” for why their team should be included. In reality, expanding the field just means more politicking for more available spots.
The hue and cry and debate and outrage is all part and parcel of the process in college football, no matter how it changes, and the power brokers love it. They love the endless discussion. They love how pundits were still giving hot takes on why Alabama did or did not deserve to get kept out of the 2024 playoff field all the way until the 2025 season was beginning, just like they’ll be wrangling over the Alabama, Miami or Notre Dame question well into the summer of 2026. You could eliminate a good bit of the controversy by just releasing the rankings on the day after the conference championship games, much like they did it in basketball with Selection Sunday. Sure, there were mock brackets and predictions for weeks, but you didn’t know officially where everyone stood until the bracket came out. Of course, the NCAA had to go muck with that, too, and now releases a projection on the top 16 teams in the entire field as the regular season winds down.
Getting rid of the week-by-week rankings won’t happen because then you lose all the eyeballs and attention that focuses on each set of rankings when it comes out. Why? Ratings, baby, ratings! The week-by-week CFP rankings in November and December because they provoke debate, while also providing endless grist for the content mill in sports media. You can break down the latest set of rankings, then spend time predicting what the rankings will be, then dissect that next set of rankings and lather, rinse, repeat your way through the same cycle for a whole month and fans eat it up. It’s the equivalent of the snake eating its own tail, but continuing to get fatter and longer in the process.
With super-sized conferences, TV rights deals for mega-bucks, and yes, NIL dollars now at play, this haphazard chaos is the path that college football has chosen.
And it’s a path that is set in stone for the foreseeable future — competitive balance and entertainment be damned.