Committee corruption exposed. A baffling Notre Dame snub, a fabricated Alabama defense, and a sham explanation reveal a rigged system.
Yeah, I get it, the Notre Dame guy is upset that the team he covers got left out of the College Football Playoff. I am upset about that, absolutely, but this goes way, way beyond a fan view of what happened to the Irish in the final playoff rankings. What today showed wasn't even just about Notre Dame, although I think it happening to Notre Dame adds fuel to the fire. What today showed is that the College Football Playoff Committee has been completely corrupted and needs to be done away with.
There is no precedent for what happened to Notre Dame in the final rankings. There was no precedent for Alabama not dropping in the rankings. There was no precedent for a team who didn't play - Miami - jumping in front of another team that didn't play - Notre Dame - in the final ranking. In fact, with Boise State's Mountain West Conference Championship win over UNLV, the only thing that changed was Notre Dame's strength of schedule jumped higher than Miami's.
Head to head matters, no one with any sense will deny that. But the explanation given by the chair of the committee - Hunter Yurachek - is some of the most absurd, dishonest, shallow and just outright unbelievable nonsense we've ever heard. If Miami was better than Notre Dame because of the head to head, but BYU was better than Miami, than BYU and Miami both should have jumped ahead of Notre Dame a week ago, if not longer.
Yurachek claimed just five days ago that the committee was back and forth on who was better, Notre Dame or Alabama, and that's why Alabama jumped ahead of Notre Dame after needing a "gutsy" fourth quarter call to beat a 5-7 Auburn team who fired their head coach a couple of weeks prior. He said - in what we now all know was a complete lie - that is was a very spirited debate and only in the end were a couple of committee members swayed.
So let me get this straight. In the final two weeks of the season Alabama needed a late stop to beat a 5-7 team and then got dominated by Georgia in the SEC Championship game, and that led the committee to decide Alabama was a better team than Notre Dame? I don't know what's more offensive, that they made such an absurd, dishonest decision or they actually thought people would believe this preposterous explanation.
The reality is this was always going to happen. They were always going to screw over Notre Dame. This was nothing more than using Notre Dame to generate buzz and drama to get people to tune into the show.
The plan was to screw Notre Dame all along. If BYU won they were going to jump Notre Dame. If BYU lost they were going to jump Miami over Notre Dame. Notre Dame was going to be out regardless. The one truthful thing Yurachek said today was that Alabama wasn't going to drop behind Notre Dame, no matter what happened in the SEC title game.
Everything Yurachek said about Notre Dame and Miami a week ago was flipped upside down, and he thinks we are all dumb enough to believe it's because they rewatched the week one game between Miami and Notre Dame? I'm curious, did the committee also go back and watch the Florida State vs Alabama game? You know, the game where a 5-7 Florida State team beat Alabama by 14 points and out-gained the Crimson Tide by more yards (41) than Miami outgained Notre Dame (25).
Of course they didn't, and it wouldn't have mattered if they did. The SEC and Big Ten control the committee and the playoffs, and at least for this season the other two "power" leagues - the ACC and Big 12 - have a say as well. Their broadcast partner - ESPN - is also in bed with the SEC to the tune of $3 billion dollars a year. What's the best way to ensure that the SEC doesn't get left out of the title game for the third straight season? Eliminate one of the teams everyone on the planet knows can beat all of those teams, and stock half the 10 real playoff teams with SEC teams. Even ones who finished the year 2-2 and scored more than 40 points against a Power 4 team a grand total of zero times.
We were all lied to for weeks, and it was all for show. It was all for TV ratings and it wasn't about resumes, or getting the best teams in. You can spin it all you want, but if Miami had a better resume than Notre Dame because of the head to head that should have been determined a week ago when their resumes were complete. This was all a game to them, and a dishonest one at that.
There was never any intention of Alabama being behind Notre Dame. Otherwise, Yurachek wouldn't have given us the lame, dishonest spin about how impressed they were with Alabama's 27-20 win over a 5-7 Auburn team with an interim coach. If a 7-point win over a bad Auburn team - who out-gained Alabama by over 100 yards - and a 28-7 loss to Georgia wasn't going to drop Alabama down nothing was. It was all a game, it was all about creating fake drama to get TV ratings before they do what they were always going to do.
What this all showed is that leaving this up to corruptible people that have clear agendas has destroyed any faith there is in the system. As bad as the BCS was, and it was bad, at least you knew the formulas going in. You knew what you needed to do to move up or down. The system was what it was and you had to live with it. There was no Thursday pitch sessions where schools sent reps to convince the committee of why they should move their team. No committee filled with current Athletic Directors - many at the Power 4 level - who know the millions that are at stake for conferences based on the number of teams they get it.
The system as we have it now is dead. I'm not talking about the number of teams, that will continue to evolve. It's time to get rid of the system that involves a committee that meets, wastes our time, lies to us and pretends that there is no bias, no agendas by the committee or their ESPN overlords. It's time to go back to a BCS style system to give us the rankings.
It's a lot harder to lie and manipulate the rankings when there are no humans there to corrupt it. It's time to blow up the committee process and go back to computer models. Is there the potential for human error there? Yes, and I've voiced my concerns with the BCS in the past. But the last three seasons have caused me to change my view, as someone who once supported the human committee. I wrongly gave the committee the benefit of the doubt and assumed they would ultimately do the right thing, and during the 4-team playoff I believe they did for the most part. But in 2023 it started to change with Florida State, and this past season was the final straw for me, the system is broken and needs to die.
Whoever has the power to do so needs to fight to do whatever possible to eliminate the human committee, otherwise the trust that was lost this season will undermine the very credibility of the sport.
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