Notre Dame AD slams College Football Playoff selection process, laments 'stolen' berth

The College Football Playoff selection committee was never going to please everyone with its 2025 bracket. The decision to hold Notre Dame out of the 12-team field was a move that left the Fighting Irish and much of the college football world stunned. Athletic director Pete Bevacqua said Notre Dame feels as though a playoff berth was "stolen" from its players after its controversial slide behind Miami in the final top 25 rankings.

Hours after learning it would not be included in the 12-team CFP bracket, Notre Dame announced it will not participate in bowl season.

"As a team, we've decided to withdraw our name from consideration for a bowl game following the 2025 season," Notre Dame wrote in a statement. "We appreciate all the support from our families and fans, and we're hoping to bring the 12th national title to South Bend in 2026." 

The Fighting Irish entered conference championship week on the right side of the projected cut line and two spots ahead of the Hurricanes in the rankings. Neither team played a game this week, yet the committee felt it had enough evidence from the season-long results to swap them and put Miami in the field as the No. 10 seed.

"There is no explanation that could possibly be given to explain the outcome," Bevacqua said to Yahoo Sports. "As I said to Marcus (Freeman), one thing is for sure: Any rankings or show prior to this last one is an absolute joke and a waste of time. Why put these young student-athletes through these false emotions just to pull the rug out from underneath them having not played a game in two weeks and then a group of people in a room shatter their dreams without explanation? We feel like the playoff was stolen from our student-athletes."

This marks the second time in as many weeks that Notre Dame dropped in the rankings in favor of another CFP contender. Alabama leaped over the Fighting Irish at the end of the regular season despite winning by a smaller margin over Auburn than Notre Dame did over Stanford. Marcus Freeman's team won 10 games in a row but fell out of favor with the committee down the stretch, leading to one of the most questionable snubs of the playoff era.

"My feelings and the feelings here are just shock and, really, an absolute sense of sadness for our student-athletes," Bevacqua said. "Overwhelming shock and sadness. Like a collective feeling that we were all just punched in the stomach."

Miami's head-to-head win over Notre Dame in Week 1 proved decisive in determining which of the two bubble teams earned the final at-large playoff berth. The question facing the committee is why it took until Dec. 7 for that result to matter. The Fighting Irish ranked ahead of the Hurricanes in every set of CFP rankings before Sunday.

The committee's explanation was that the head-to-head comparison only came into effect once the two teams were separated by one spot.

"Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, we had that side-by-side comparison," committee chair Hunter Yurachek said. "The one metric we had to fall back on was the head-to-head. We charged the committee members to go back and watch that Miami-Notre Dame game."