The ACC and the CFP committee screwed ND. How can a mediocre 3-loss Alabama team that just got their butt kicked by Georgia be ranked higher than ND. And…if you probable high draft pick why would you play in a bowl game where you could possibly ruin your future NFL career when the game does not include a possibility of a NCAA championship?
We need to get away from the ACC. This relationship helps only the ACC. They and the ESPN are going to make no money off ND from any bowl game.
Quote from AD on the Dan Patrick show. “The captains and some of the other underclassmen on the team said, ‘Listen, we are such a close-knit team. We've done so much this season. We overcame those two opening losses. We rallied. We dominated in the last 10 games. We can't imagine taking the field not as that team.’ “It's reality, Dan. You know that certain players wouldn't participate in that game. You think about somebody with the future that he has, like a Jeremiyah Love, a Jadarian Price, Eli Rairdon, Aamil Wagner, who's one of the most impressive people I've met in my life, who hopefully after he's done playing football, I hope he runs for president one day. “It just wouldn't be the same. Made the decision that it was time to start thinking about next season, give these student-athletes a break. They have exams coming up. Hopefully they'll go home and spend Christmas and the holidays with their family and friends.” __________________________ The above was important to me, because I didn't want it to be the AD and/or Coach Freeman going to the players and telling them that they aren't going to play or that there was a vote and it was a majority but not 100%. Sounds like the team 100% was ready to call it a year after the CFP screw job.
Tim, as I understand it, ND doesn't split its bowl or CFP income with the ACC, but Miami does. Corey pointed this out. There's your answer why the ACC lobbied for Miami, hence my earlier reference to biased, self-motivated "others". The problem is, ND football agreed to connect with the ACC so that all the other ND sports, men and women, could be full members. The condition was that the football program had to schedule 5 games per season with ACC football teams. If I'm wrong in how I remember this, someone please correct me. We can't justify penalizing the other sports. What we can do is take the decision out of the ACC's hands via our performance on the field. You can bet this will be emphasized from now through the entire 2026 season by the coaches and the players themselves. It won't be a promotional ad when the teams on our 2026 schedule are warned to to fear the Irish.
Sid, there has been a lot of discussion over the time we've had the ACC deal and there is a lot of people who feel like Football takes precedent over all the other sports. That we should have joined the "New" Big East for all our non-football sports. They don't do Hockey but heck we're in the Big 10 for Hockey and I don't think they do some other sports and they aren't strong in anything beyond basketball. But a lot of people think that is just fine. The old Big East was a lot like that and people were just fine with it. The problem now is that we've got contracts. Clemson and FSU tried to get out of the ACC and were not able to do so and ended up with a compromise where they get a bigger share of revenue. We have the same issue. We're signed up with the ACC through 2036. They won't let us go without a fight. I see people saying we should form our own conference and get teams like Texas, USC, Stanford, etc to join us and put it all on NBC. First thing that comes to mind is that I don't know any Texas people who are unhappy with the Longhorns in the SEC. It's been good for all their sports and and they make a lot of money.
I stole this from another board. Here are five thoughts on Notre Dame’s College Football Playoff snub, its decision to decline a bowl invitation and everything those two events mean moving forward. 1. Notre Dame got screwed and has every right to be as furious as it is No one in their right mind would argue that Notre Dame is not a playoff-caliber football team. And yet, the Irish will be watching the CFP from home. Based on everything athletics director Pete Bevacqua told Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger, the Irish also feel like the CFP Selection Committee lied to them for five weeks. And they are absolutely right about that. Ranking Miami over Notre Dame is a perfectly defensible decision to make (the Hurricanes had worse losses but the better win; results vs. common opponents were about equal and the Irish lost head to head). But to make that switch after neither team played? Inexcusable. It should not matter that there was a “buffer” team in between them. Either Notre Dame is better than Miami or it is not. The committee clearly overreacted to the Canes’ second loss in its first rankings, which placed them at No. 18, and thought they would lose a third game eventually. When the opposite happened — Miami looked every bit like a CFP team in its final four games — the committee panicked and Notre Dame got jobbed. However, what made even less sense is the way Alabama was treated over the last two weeks, which reeks of SEC bias. The Tide have not looked like a playoff team at any point in November, losing to Oklahoma’s anemic offense, struggling with 5-7 Auburn and falling to Georgia by three touchdowns in the SEC title game. And yet, the committee felt it wise to move Alabama up after the Auburn game and keep it there after the Georgia game. If the committee moved Alabama down just one spot, like it did for BYU after pretty much the same result, that buffer that it cared about so much would still exist between Notre Dame and Miami. Or, better yet, it could have put both the Irish and Hurricanes in. Crediting the Tide for beating a bad Auburn team and leaving them at No. 9 after getting blown out is SEC bias, plain and simple. And it cost Notre Dame. 2. The snub does highlight an issue that Marcus Freeman and company must fix in future years The exception is 2026, when Notre Dame opens with Wisconsin and Rice. But by virtue of their independence (and their scheduling agreement with the ACC, a bad football conference), the Irish will often face their toughest opponents in early September. Which means starting faster is a must if they don’t want this to happen again. We said it at the time: The biggest issue with Notre Dame’s 0-2 start was its remaining schedule. Miami and Texas A&M were its only chances to beat a quality opponent (USC at home does not count). The committee has traditionally cared more about good wins than bad losses, which is why it ranked the Irish No. 5 last year despite losing to Northern Illinois. They had to win one of those first two games to ensure themselves a CFP bid, and they did not. To prevent this in the future, Notre Dame must figure out how to start faster. Of Marcus Freeman‘s 12 losses as the head coach in South Bend, six happened in August or September. Freeman has proven extremely adept at fixing his team’s issues in-season. But because of the way the Irish like to (and have to) schedule, he has to identify those issues in fall camp and correct them before Week 1. 3. I don’t agree with Notre Dame declining its bowl invitation, but I do get why the Irish did it Eric Hansen had great insight yesterday as to why Notre Dame said “Thanks, but no thanks” to facing BYU in the Pop-Tarts Bowl. Essentially, it was a player-led decision. “According to a source, Notre Dame’s player leadership felt that with all the impending individual opt-outs — for NFL Draft and injury recovery reasons — the 2025 Fighting Irish football team that essentially played 10 straight elimination games over the final 11 weeks of the season ‘would not accurately be represented’ by the one that showed up to play in Camping World Stadium.” Hansen wrote. “Not that the version that could have played couldn’t be competitive, but the players felt like it did no service to the legacy of the 2025 team to play.” There is precedent that backs up the players’ logic. Florida State, after being snubbed from the playoff in 2023 despite winning the ACC and finishing 13-0, lost 63-3 to Georgia with a skeleton roster in the Orange Bowl. And I get that fear, particularly after seeing what has become of Florida State since that day. But I would argue that Notre Dame’s culture under Freeman is stronger. Plus, the Irish would have fewer opt-outs than the Seminoles did at that time. CJ Carr would have played. So would Leonard Moore. The running backs likely would have opted out, but their backups are perfectly capable. Notre Dame’s overall roster depth would have been enough to withstand some opt-outs, especially if a few of Drayk Bowen, Boubacar Traore, Adon Shuler, Aamil Wagner, Christian Gray and others with real draft decisions choose to come back for one more year. I also get the urge to stick it to ESPN. Notre Dame felt used and slighted by the network, so it did not want to generate more rating and money for it. But the better “screw you” to the powers that be, in my opinion, would have been going to Camping World Stadium and beating BYU by 30. Frankly, I think that would have happened if the Cougars met an angry Irish team in Orlando. 4. Pros and cons of Notre Dame’s decision On the pro side, the biggest one is Freeman and his staff can devote their entire attention spans to preparing for 2026. The transfer portal does not officially open until Jan. 2, but silly things like “rules” and “dates” have never stopped teams from reaching out to portal targets before. General manager Mike Martin said Wednesday that the Irish are close to that point already. “We’ve been working on that for a little while,” Martin said. “We’ve sort of narrowed our focus on some targets, and when we’re able to reach out to them, we will at the appropriate time.” There is also the “stick it to ESPN” point, which is a petty reason to opt out of a bowl game but a reason nonetheless. On the con side, Notre Dame lost 15 practices that could help young players prepare for 2026 — and the opportunity to get a better sense of which positions it will actually need in the transfer portal. For example, if Malachi Fields opted out of the bowl game to prepare for the NFL Draft, it might benefit the Irish to see Micah Gilbert and Cam Williams get a game to themselves. That way, they know if they need another Fields next year. Finally, bowl games are designed to be fun for the players and teams involved. That’s particularly true for the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which Notre Dame would have attended if it accepted the invitation. I completely understand that the players, in that moment, were so devastated that they couldn’t imagine playing in any game but the CFP. But they might feel differently three weeks from now. 5. Where do the Irish go from here? Simple: They work for the next eight months and turn every game into a rage-filled slaughter fest. Seriously. Look at Notre Dame’s September schedule. It’s Wisconsin in a Shamrock Series game at Lambeau Field, Rice at home, Michigan State at home and Purdue on the road. That would be a decent schedule seven-to-10 years ago, but it is not right now (pending the Badgers’ pledge to go all-in on NIL and the transfer portal, which needs to be seen to be believed). The Irish apparently have an agreement in place that makes them a CFP team if they get ranked in the top 12 next year. I would be shocked if that winds up mattering. Their toughest game on paper next year is Miami, who A. Does not know who its starting quarterback will be and B. Will be met with Notre Dame’s full wrath in all its fury. We’ll need to see where the offseason goes, but unless the Irish fully strike out on transfer portal defensive tackles, I expect I’ll be picking them to go 11-1 or 12-0 in 2026. This should be a national championship-level roster, if they channel what happened Sunday in the right direction. I believe they will.
I'm sure that we'll have a few in the portal, we do every year. If you aren't a starter and aren't going to the NFL then there is a good chance you might consider a new team where you can be a starter. Pat Coogan would have been nice to have on the ND roster this year but he wasn't going to be a starter and so for his last year he portaled to IU where he's now a starter on the #1 team and Big Ten Champion IU. If he gets to the NFL, he'll always be labeled as an Indiana kid and not a ND kid in spite of having an ND degree and I believe he was 4 years at ND.
If you are a ND fan a good article, if not an ND fan probably just a lot of BS. https://x.com/ghosted_machine/status/1997914636654420409
I've read some articles that think that this might be the beginning of the end for most of the bowls. For a school like ND bowls are not too much of a problem because they can sell most if not all of the tickets forced on them by the bowl. However, many schools have to eat a large portion of the tickets they're given by the bowl. Iowa St. and K St. have also bowed out this year. As faras ND is concerned, the bowls years agod went from invites to predetermined teams in agreements with conferences. ND was locked out of many of the top bowls. So now after years of being kept from many major bowls ND has decided to rfeturn the favor. The Pop Tart Bowl or whoever can dig up another conference team. We don't give a crap. Why keep our kids from enjoying the holidays at home instead of practicing to play a game you don't really want to be in against a team that probably cares and wants to beat ND. Let the bowls feel what rejection tastes like.
Yes and no. ESPN has to immediately start addressing the fact that the committee "may" have screwed up because the NFL and Vegas people in the industry absolutely lost their sh*t over ND getting snubbed. Meanwhile you've got the SEC commissioner out there saying he thought the SEC could have had 7 teams in. (Read the room, Sankey). Some in the media can say whatever. They're gonna do that anyway. When the industry people come out ferociously against you immediately, you reassess.
Love is a Heisman Finalist, along with Mendoza, Sayin, and Pavia. Mendoza is going to win. He locked it up with Big 10 Championship game.
Well I wasn’t a big SEC conspiracist before I sure as hell Am now. How can a 8-3 Alabama team that losses by 3 TDs and had minus 4 rushing be ranked higher than ND?
Tim, it looks like the AD agrees with you: “We were mystified by the actions of the conference to attack their biggest, really, business partner in football and a member of their conference in 24 of our other sports. I would tell you, Dan, I wouldn't be honest with you if I didn't say that they have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame.” - Pete Bevacqua on the Dan Patrick Show
Here's the full transcript of the AD's comments. My son has interacted with him a couple of times in connection with Holtz's Heroes activities. Brian says he seems "authentic, engaging, genuine, very smart." Notre Dame AD: ACC caused 'permanent damage' P.S. He'll appear before the media at noon ET today (Tuesday, Dec. 9)
They are saying that Markus Burton will be out for 8 weeks. That's tough for him of course, but it is an opportunity for somebody to step up, next man in and all that.