The decision to leave Notre Dame out of this season's College Football Playoffs started a ripple effect throughout the sport, specifically around the process of the selection committee. The Irish spent almost the entire month of November ranked at either 9th or 10th in the rankings but after sitting idle during championship weekend, they dropped to 11th behind Alabama and Miami and became the first team out of the 2025-2026 College Football Playoffs.
This began to raise a lot of questions throughout the media, and not just from the Notre Dame beat, Fighting Irish alumni or blue and gold fans. How, in a weekend where Miami and Notre Dame were idle and Alabama lost in their conference championship game by 21 points did the Irish drop out of the playoffs to be passed up by a 10-3 team with a loss to 5-7 team and a 10-2 team with two losses to unranked opponents. One of the first members of the media to speak out about Alabama's likely fate was former Crimson Tide running back Mark Ingram.
"Bama, you played Georgia in the SEC championship, you lose by 21," Ingram said prior to the Big Ten championship. "I got too much Bama in me, but you're out. Now, Miami and Notre Dame should both get in, in my opinion. I think that's the decision the committee is going to have to make because when you have two bad losses (entering) the championship game, you have to play well in the championship game."
Ingram wasn't the only former Alabama running back to speak out about the Crimson Tide being put into the playoffs over Notre Dame. Damien Harris, who played for Alabama from 2015 to 2018, voiced his opinion after the rankings were released.
"I thought they deserved that spot more than Alabama," Harris explained on CBS Sports. "I'm going to get ridiculed all over social media but Alabama hasn't been convincing enough. I’ll go back to that Oklahoma game, and then you look at LSU. I wasn’t impressed then. We weren’t impressed after Auburn, damn sure weren’t impressed after what we saw last night and there was just no movement."
Several talking heads at ESPN refused to acknowledge the blasphemous decision of their playoff selection committee's omission of Notre Dame except for former NFL quarterback Dan Orlovsky. The former Detroit Lions quarterback shared his opinions on Monday's Get Up show.
"Notre Dame should have been in over Alabama," Orlovsky stated. "I am 100 percent onboard with having Miami in because of that head-to-head point. Alabama hasn’t played good football in a month. I said Friday if Alabama gets boat-raced then I would leave them out, and they got boat-raced. They didn’t look good in that game, they didn’t look good against Auburn, they didn’t look good against OU. Shoot, they didn’t look good against LSU like 5 weeks ago."
"Notre Dame, unequivocally, is a team that people can sit there and say ‘Yes, they could win a national title," Orlovsky continued to explain. "The way Alabama has played, at least in the last four to five weeks, is not a team right now that can win a national championship."
Something has to be changed with the process of selecting the playoff field. If the true goal of the selection committee is to put in the 12 best teams, they failed miserably this season. Notre Dame, by their own metrics, was playing like a top 10 team for the majority of the season and it wasn't just apparent to us here at Irish Breakdown. Several other members of the media like Orlovsky, Ingram and Harris knows the committee was just flat wrong.
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