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Tears Irish Tears

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Braduhley said:
What's the point? Letting your seniors have one more ride, getting weeks of valuable practice. game experience against a high tier opponent for your backups and freshman who will be starting next year. Just a few off the top of my head.
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Revenue. Trip to Orlando.
 
What a life lesson Freeman is giving his players. When life doesn’t go the way you want, throw a hissy fit and quit. I’m sure parents of recruits are very impressed.
 
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I'd like to wait to the last minute possible & cancel the 2026 game at South Bend. Just put a statement out to take the fine out of our winnings. No other statement. Their heads might explode.
 



Highlights:
... final thoughts on Notre Dame’s CFP selection Sunday gut-punch, which pulled the plug on a season with legitimate national title aspirations.

1. it was hard to argue Notre Dame belonged in the last at-large spot, considering Miami won the head-to-head meeting. Instead of crumbling after a couple of midseason losses, the Hurricanes closed on a tear similar to the Irish. And they still had that opening-weekend win. The games needed to matter, which they did. Unless we’re talking about the SEC Championship Game, which apparently didn’t matter at all.

Untethered by logic but armed with data, Yurachek cited Alabama building a 17-0 lead at Auburn, glossing over the fact the Crimson Tide blew that lead. He cited Notre Dame’s 70-7 win over Syracuse, missing the factor that margins of victory beyond 24 points aren’t supposed to matter. He couldn’t compare Notre Dame and Miami until he charged the committee members to rewatch their Week 1 game three months after the fact. The committee was making it up as it went along, the Wizard of Oz hoping no one looked behind the curtain. ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit did, calling his network’s dog-and-pony show a “mistake and misleading.”

2. ESPN and the CFP reduced Notre Dame to a plot twist in their television show.
Walking away from the season looks bad on the surface for Notre Dame. It’s taking their golden football and going home. Notre Dame usually gets what it wants, including the full $20 million payout last year for making the title game, money usually given to a school’s conference. But this is a protest vote against the system more than anything, even if Notre Dame hasn’t articulated that well. All bowl games outside of the CFP are exhibitions devoid of real stakes. They exist only because enough people watch them on ESPN. And now, with Notre Dame sitting out the postseason, fewer will be watching.

3. skipping the 15 bowl practices is a negative. Also yes, Freeman and his staff can flip fully to next season, especially when the transfer portal opens on Jan. 2. Because if this snub fuels anything, it has to be using this time to build a better version of Notre Dame for 2026.

4. For the record, the correct order of Notre Dame, Alabama and Miami should have been 9) Miami 10) Notre Dame 11) Alabama. The point of the CFP is not to incentivize playing in conference championship games.

5. It’s hard to know where Notre Dame’s relationship with the ACC goes from here, or how much of the pettiness on the part of the conference will be forgotten. The official ACC Football account taking aim at the Irish’s resume on X and the ACC Network showing Notre Dame-Miami 13 times last week don’t need to leave scars.

Notre Dame’s real concern should be the competence of a conference that allowed its championship game to be played between Virginia and five-loss Duke. The league failed to put in place a system that got Miami to the conference title game, opening the door for James Madison to steal a bid. That’s strategic mismanagement.

The league could have avoided alienating Notre Dame simply by having the foresight to put guardrails in place to get its best teams to its marquee event. Instead of Notre Dame and Miami in the CFP, the ACC put in place protocols that led to Notre Dame or Miami.

Now the entire Playoff is worse off.
6. Notre Dame doesn’t need to join a conference. Nothing has changed. How well did joining the Big 12 work out for BYU in Sunday’s rankings?

7. The blame Notre Dame must shoulder itself:
- Its fundamental misunderstanding of the roster during training camp is part of the story. Notre Dame didn’t know what it had in new starting quarterback CJ Carr when it kicked off against Miami, which is fine, but offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock knew what he had in star running back Jeremiyah Love and still gave him 10 carries while having Carr throw it 30 times. Defensive coordinator Chris Ash knew what Al Golden left behind on defense, only to reconfigure things enough that the players didn’t understand their assignments until a quarter of the season had been played. The growth arc of Notre Dame’s season made for an interesting story, but it never forgave the original sins against Miami and Texas A&M.

Whether it’s losing to Marshall or Northern Illinois or whether it’s gameplanning for Miami and Texas A&M, Notre Dame can’t afford these kinds of misreads.

Notre Dame likes to say it has the best coaching staff in the country. Maybe that’s true in October and November. But it has to be true on opening night from now on. Notre Dame lost the benefit of the doubt with its 0-2 start. And through all the blowouts of bottom feeders like Arkansas, Purdue, Boston College, Syracuse and Stanford, it never won it back.

Notre Dame’s athletic department failed its football program by giving Freeman Miami and Texas A&M back-to-back to start the season.
Opening against Texas A&M last year and at Miami this season were calculated risks. They made sense, both the win in College Station and the loss at Coral Gables. But to staple Texas A&M onto this year’s slate immediately after the Miami game was madness.

Yet the schedules put together by Notre Dame, when accounting for the albatross of five ACC games, plus Navy, USC and at least one “buy game” like Rice, have given the football program neither room to grow (see: playing the season’s two hardest games at the beginning) nor material that can win hearts and minds throughout the fall. Other than the USC game, did anyone pay attention to Notre Dame after Sept. 13?

Even USC in primetime barely moved the needle. More people watched LSU-Vanderbilt that weekend.

A good Notre Dame schedule, especially given the Irish don’t play in a conference championship game, has to be tougher in the regular season than that of other CFP contenders. To get the benefit of the doubt, you’ve got to schedule up. But those schedules also have to be paced correctly from start to finish. This year’s slate didn’t do either. Next year? The Irish may end up playing two ranked teams. But they’ll have to wait until November to face Miami and USC.
 
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