Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua still isn’t happy his team was left out of the 12-team College Football Playoff field.
“We were shocked, I would say, mystified, about what happened Sunday,” he told reporters Tuesday. “… We had one of the most dominant 10-game runs in the history of college football.”
He also said it was “the ultimate gut punch” the team doesn’t get to participate in the CFP while pointing out it is “a bitter pill to swallow” because he believes the Fighting Irish had enough talent to “absolutely” win the national title:
Notre Dame didn’t look like a CFP team when it lost the first two games of the season to Miami and Texas A&M, but it responded with 10 straight wins to finish the season. That winning streak included victories over Boise State, USC, Navy and Pittsburgh, and the Fighting Irish were included in the projected bracket in every weekly CFP rankings release.
But that changed with the final one, which determined the actual field.
While Miami and Notre Dame were both idle during conference championship weekend, the Hurricanes ended up jumping the Fighting Irish and seizing the final at-large spot. BYU was in between the two teams in the penultimate rankings but dropped after losing the Big 12 title game to Texas Tech.
That put Miami and Notre Dame right next to each other, which seemed to make the Hurricanes’ head-to-head victory the difference.
Notre Dame’s bigger gripe might come with Alabama, which somehow moved up a spot from the Week 14 poll to the Week 16 one while barely beating a 5-7 Auburn team and getting blown out by Georgia in the SEC title game.
The Crimson Tide were the only team to not drop with a loss in a conference championship game, and they ended up with one of the at-large spots with three losses.
Bevacqua’s comments suggest it is going to take Notre Dame some time to get over the snub, and the team responded by withdrawing from consideration for any bowl game.
