Before we get into all the yelling, let’s meditate for a moment …
The Indiana Hoosiers won the Big Ten Championship Game.
The undefeated Indiana Hoosiers won the Big Ten Championship Game.
The undefeated Indiana Hoosiers, the top-ranked team in college football, won the Big Ten Championship Game.
The undefeated Indiana Hoosiers, the top-ranked team in college football, beat the Ohio State Buckeyes to win the Big Ten Championship Game.
This sport gives us miracles. It teaches us to find joy in the unexpected, and to go through our days with a sense of wonder. The chaos and randomness of college football is a reflection of the chaos and randomness that makes life so fascinating. We must savor every Saturday, but the spirit of the sport can also guide our daily lives.
The undefeated Indiana Hoosiers, the top-ranked team in college football, beat the undefeated reigning national champion Ohio State Buckeyes in the Big Ten Championship Game, and will be the #1 seed in the College Football Playoff.
And now ... on to the yelling.
– Rodger Sherman
How the Playoff screwed up this time
I am not a Notre Dame fan. In fact, I have written articles and made videos so vitriolically opposed to Notre Dame that I have been accused of being a Notre Dame hater.
Accused correctly, by the way. I am, in fact, a Notre Dame hater.
But after the release of the 2025 College Football Playoff bracket, I have to write something I never thought I would write: Notre Dame got jobbed by the Committee, and I’m mad about it.
Notre Dame deserved to be in the Playoff over Alabama, straight-up.
Notre Dame ranked higher than Alabama in Bill Connelly’s SP+ (#5 vs. #12, before Alabama’s loss Saturday), ESPN’s FPI (#3 vs. #8), Brian Fremeau’s FEI rankings (#4 vs. #10), the Massey Ratings (#6 vs. #10), the Sagarin ratings (#3 vs. #9), and the final AP and Coaches polls (#9 vs. #11 in both).
Notre Dame’s two losses were by a combined four points. Its most recent loss was on September 14th. Alabama lost a game by 21 points … yesterday.
Both of Notre Dame’s losses were to eventual playoff teams. Alabama’s worst loss was to 5-7 Florida State, which will not play in a bowl game.
The Committee’s inconsistent process made its bad decision even worse
Two weeks ago, Notre Dame was ranked higher than Alabama and Miami. It hasn’t lost since, and now it is below Alabama and Miami.
Alabama jumped Notre Dame last week when the Tide beat 5-7 Auburn by seven points while Notre Dame beat 4-8 Stanford by 29. Then Alabama lost a game by 21 and stayed ahead of Notre Dame. Huh.
Miami jumped Notre Dame despite both teams being idle this past week. The committee’s justification — and I’m not making this up — is that last week, Notre Dame’s head-to-head loss to Miami did not matter, because BYU was in between Notre Dame and Miami in the standings. However, because BYU’s loss yesterday put Notre Dame and Miami next to each other, now Notre Dame’s head-to-head loss to Miami does matter.
What? How? Why?
What possible logic is there for saying that head-to-head doesn’t matter when one team is ranked 9th and the other is ranked 11th, but it does matter when one is ranked 10th and the other is ranked 11th????
What? How? Why?
And by the way: How come Alabama didn’t drop at all because of their 21-point playoff loss, but BYU dropped because of their 27-point loss, enabling the exact scenario we discussed? Time after time, it feels like the committee comes up with the ranking they want and then justifies it in retrospect.
With such bad choices, we have to assume bad faith motives.
The committee’s decisions may have a lot to do with reasons besides actual college football results.
Knocking Alabama out of the Playoff would have set a precedent that playing in a conference championship game is bad for fringe playoff teams. The committee seems to have decided that bad losses in conference championship games can’t negatively impact teams, thus ensuring that theses games remain viable at a moment when there’s talk of teams wanting to skip them and conferences wanting to drop them. Conference championship games might be good for the future of college football (and the paychecks of athletic department employees), but ignoring them is a piss-poor way to rank teams.
Putting Miami in the Playoff avoids a meltdown from one of four “power conferences” seemingly guaranteed a spot by the selection committee. We saw what happens when you leave the ACC out two years ago when 13-0 Florida State missed the Playoff. It nearly disintegrated the league. Again, keeping the ACC intact and happy might be good for the long-term future of the sport, but it has nothing to do with the best college football teams of 2025.
Speaking of … Alabama seems to have a way of getting into the Playoff over more deserving teams. That undefeated 2023 Florida State team was left out for 12-1 Alabama. Now 10-3 Alabama is in over 10-2 Notre Dame. What are the odds that the biggest brand in college football would keep getting included?
If the Committee wants to avoid accusations of impropriety, the solution is easy: Switch back to a system in which impartial computer rankings have a major say in who makes the Playoff, rather than one decided by 13 highly connected industry members, many of whom are literally employed by the schools they are ranking.
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It’s Playoff Time at Homefield
OK, now that I’m done being FURIOUS about the Playoff Committee’s selections … WHO WANTS COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF MERCH?!?!?!?
Our friends at Homefield Apparel have shirts for all 12 Playoff teams, including TULANE and JAMES MADISON!
And of course, because Homefield was founded by Indiana football diehards, they have Indiana Big Ten champs gear. Homefield’s CEO, Connor, was in the crowd last night living and dying with the Hoosiers.
IT HAPPENED!
In the very first edition of Sports!, all the way back on November 9th, I wrote about a peculiar scenario unfolding in the College Football Playoff race:
The ACC is headed for a potential playoff disaster … the College Football Playoff awards automatic bids to the five highest-rated conference champions.
Whoever wins the ACC will probably fit that description. But we could see a scenario in which the ACC champion is the sixth-highest rated champion.
If Duke wins out, it could be the ACC champion at 9-4, with no wins against ranked opponents and losses to UConn and Tulane. If 11-2 Tulane wins the American and 12-1 James Madison wins the Sun Belt, the ACC could miss out on the playoff altogether. The league office needs to start pulling the strings for Miami now.
Sure enough: Tulane won the American at 11-2 …
… JMU won the Sun Belt at 12-1 …
and Duke won the ACC … not at 9-4, but at 8-5. Even worse!
Duke’s opponent in the ACC title game, Virginia, had a chance to make the playoff with a win. Duke did not, so it doomed its opponent just for the hell of it. The Blue Devils played like they had a national championship bid on the line and won in overtime on a leaping interception by backup linebacker Luke Mergott:
I have to imagine that, to an outsider, all this ranting and raving about rankings and conferences has a Pepe Silvia vibe. “Tulane and James Madison both made the College Football Playoff because Duke won the ACC,” I scream excitedly to my wife. “Oh, OK,” she says. “Those are all colleges I’ve heard of.”
So let’s zoom out and talk about why these rankings and rules get me so excited:
College football is a sport of haves and have-nots. About half of the teams in the top division are consolidated in four power conferences, which make more money and have more fans than the other six conferences. They use their wealth and standing to entrench their power, and have in many ways rigged the game to make it harder for outsiders to achieve success. (You know, like life.) They designed the College Football Playoff: They drafted the rules, they self-legislated an outsized role on the Selection Committee, and they negotiated an unequal media rights deal in which they receive significantly more money than everybody else in the sport.
However, they left a weird loophole in the playoff rules, one I noticed all the way back in 2021. Instead of simply guaranteeing conference champions automatic bids into the College Football Playoff, the Playoff’s designers gave automatic bids to “the five highest-ranked conference champions.” Why did they do this? I couldn’t tell you. I suspect they wanted to create a false illusion of fairness while assuming that the four power conference teams would qualify every year.
But in just the second edition of the 12-team College Football Playoff, the loophole hit. Tulane, a school that once voluntarily left the SEC, and James Madison, a school that has only been playing top-division football for four seasons (and lost its coach twice in those four years), are both going to play for the national championship.
I have no illusions that this is a fair sport. But that just makes it even sweeter when a rule designed to benefit the big boys backfires.
The Upset Of The Year?!?
The FCS playoffs were supposed to be a coronation.
North Dakota State is the Last Great American Dynasty. It has won ten of the last 15 FCS national championships, including last year’s title, and went 12-0 in the regular season with an average margin of victory of 30.5 points. The Bison played six ranked opponents, and beat them by an average of 21.2 points. Bill Connelly’s SP+ had them favored by at least 12 points against the second-highest rated team in the country — and by 26 points against their Round of 16 opponent, Illinois State.
But the Redbirds pulled off a miracle comeback to take down the Bison in Fargo for the biggest upset in FCS playoffs history. The video below begins with ISU trailing 28-14 with four minutes left; it ends with the Redbirds winning 29-28 after scoring on a fourth-down scramble drill and a two-point conversion in the final minute:
This was Midwestern David vs. Goliath. (Ope! Just gonna shoot my little slingshot at your head there. Ohhhh boy that’s gonna leave a mark.) A #1 seed hadn’t lost this early in the FCS playoffs since 2004, when Eastern Washington beat #1 Southern Illinois. And NDSU had made the quarters every year since 2010, and won 14 consecutive games against Illinois State, including a 33-16 win at ISU back in October.
The upset upended the FCS title picture: NDSU were -300 favorites to win the national championship before the loss. Now, only three of the remaining eight teams have ever won a national championship, and none since 2009 when Villanova took the title.
How’d Illinois State do it? Honestly … no idea. ISU quarterback Tommy Rittenhouse threw five interceptions in the win. YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO WIN GAMES THROWING FIVE INTERCEPTIONS. It hasn’t happened at the FBS level, in any game, since 2018. (Weirdly, the last two FBS games in which this happened were both on Halloween. Spo0o0o0o0oky!) And one of those interceptions was a pick-six, and the other gave NDSU the ball on the 4-yard line, which led to a one-play touchdown drive. Illinois State gave NDSU 14 free points.
And it’s not like the Redbirds played perfectly outside of the five turnovers! They got stopped on fourth-and-goal with six minutes left, trailing by 14 points. One of ISU’s first-half punts was returned for a touchdown. NDSU’s first play from scrimmage was a 78-yard touchdown.
HOW THE HELL DID ANY OF THIS HAPPEN?
Luckily, this is college football. We don’t always need to explain why things happen. We just need to appreciate that they did.
🦉 Congratulations to the Kennesaw State Owls on winning Conference USA in their second year as an FBS team! The Owls finished 2-10 last season. One year later, they had an awesome come-from-behind victory to finish as CUSA champs at 10-3.
👿 Another big upset from the lower divisions of college football, when #2 Mount Union lost to John Carroll in double OT in the Division III playoffs. Mount Union went for it on fourth-and-goal instead of kicking a game-tying field goal and came up about two yards short.
📆 Just a heads up, I won’t be doing a college football post next Sunday after Army-Navy, but we’ll be back for the playoffs in two weeks. (The NFL posts will keep coming as scheduled!)
