Us still being behind BYU was the nail in the coffin for me.
We beat a ranked, common ND opponent on the road by 31 points and BYU struggled with a non-bowl eligible UCF at home.
If the committee was “setting it up,” to give us a chance, to me, they would have put us at #11 and ND at #10 THIS week.
That way, the BYU-TTU would have become a play-in game for BYU, and going INTO the final rankings, the committee would have to deal with #11 Miami and #10 ND from the jump, should BYU fall.
What they did this week was weaponize BYU in the #11 spot. They used them as a chess piece to protect the king.
Now, BYU can lose and the committee can go INTO the final rankings and say “well, BYU is out so we can move them down to #12 and Miami up to #11.”
Some people are interpreting this is as two-step process that the committee is setting up to get us in, but it isn’t. It’s the opposite, because they’ve opened up the scenarios where they can insulate themselves, imo.
If BYU loses and Bama wins, the committee gets to “move up” Miami to #11 but KEEP ND at #10. If BYU AND Bama lose, now they can swap ND to #9 and Bama to #10 and move us up to #11 and they don’t need to put us in over Bama because Bama lost in the SECCG and they set the precedent this week with Texas that an SEC team with “good wins” will be ranked above two loss teams.
Even MORE despicably, they’ve also “set up” the SMU out. Yuracheck said when asked by Davis that the conference championship loser “wasn’t necessarily in,” but that’s a total non-answer. The committee backed themselves into a corner last year and they avoided it this year, BUT still gave themselves the option.
For example, if BYU loses a close game to TTU, the committee could be ****ing bold as to say “BYU is a 2 loss team with their second loss coming in the conference championship to a champion that earned a bye. We are keeping them at #11.” In this scenario, they don’t reward Miami, they just elect not to punish BYU as harshly because their loss came in a CG, so BYU doesn’t “technically” get “punished” for losing, but they still don’t make the playoffs. Then can point to last year and the fact that BYU, in totality, is strong enough to stay at #11 cuz everyone else was idle.
So with a bad BYU loss, the committee gets to “reward us” with a rise to #11, but then we get kicked out by the auto-bids. With a bad BYU loss and a Bama loss, we get to move up, but they can keep ND and Bama in by swapping them. With a good BYU loss, no one moves. And (in their nightmare scenario) BYU AND Bama win, and they have to kick out ND, as well as us.
By KEEPING BYU between us and Notre Dame, the committee has set up a place where they can plausibly “run out the clock.”
TL;DR — the committee has strategically used BYU to create multiple avenues for them to “reward us” us with #11 and keep ND at #10, and say “well, if there was another week, we would have gone into that room next Tuesday and compared #11 Miami to #10 ND, but this was the final ranking and Miami is out due to the auto-bids and potentially a team from the conference they couldn’t win”.