As the minutes ticked down to the College Football Playoff selection show on Sunday, Notre Dame’s odds of making the 12-team field seemed to be moving toward lock status.
At 9 a.m. Eastern Time, FanDuel’s online sportsbook had Notre Dame’s odds to win the national championship at +800 — trailing only Ohio State, Indiana and Georgia. By noon, the Irish’s odds had shrunk to +700, tying them for third with the Bulldogs.
A similar scenario played out on Caesars Sportsbook. Notre Dame, sitting at +850 at 9 a.m., dropped to +750 by noon.
But at 12:32 p.m., the Irish’s odds of winning a 12th national championship on Jan. 19 at Hard Rock Stadium increased to infinity. That’s when ESPN revealed that Miami had leapfrogged Notre Dame in the CFP committee’s rankings and claimed the final at-large berth into the field.
That officially made Notre Dame Unlucky No. 13 — the first team out of the CFP field.
So much for the squad that won its final 10 games of the season by an average of 29.7 points per game. So much for the team listed No. 3 in Jeff Sagarin’s predictive computer rankings — nestled among Big Ten titans Ohio State, Indiana and Oregon.
So much for Notre Dame (10-2) being ahead of Miami (10-2) in every previous CFP ranking.
As it turned out, the Fighting Irish apparently had the Big 12 title-game result to blame for their demise. When Texas Tech bounced BYU 34-7 on Saturday, that dropped the Cougars beneath the Hurricanes in the committee’s rankings.
Suddenly, Notre Dame and Miami found themselves immediately adjacent. Suddenly, the Hurricanes’ 27-24 home win over the Irish on Aug. 31 — a game in which Notre Dame never led — mattered in the grand scheme of things.
“The debate I hear you guys having in my ear in the studio, I’m sure has been debated over the last 12 hours,” Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek, the CFP committee chair, said on ESPN’s selection show. “And that was the debate we had in our committee room until the early morning hours and then, again, as the sun was coming up.”
The CFP committee did its debating in a conference room in Grapevine, Texas.
“The first move 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. And once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungering for with Notre Dame and Miami.
“And you look at those two teams on paper, and they are almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against their common opponents. But the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head. I charged the committee members to go back and watch that game again … because it was so far back. And we got some interesting debate from our coaches on what that game looked like as we watched it.
“With that in mind, we gave Miami the nod over Notre Dame into that 10 spot.”
BYU (11-2) finished officially as the second team out. Texas (9-3), Vanderbilt (10-2), Utah (10-2) and Southern California (9-3) rounded out the top 16.
Arizona, Michigan, Virginia, Tulane, Houston, Georgia Tech, Iowa, James Madison and North Texas completed the Top 25.
