Dave Hyde: Miami’s in, Notre Dame’s out and . . . who really cares why?

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Here’s the good news:

The Miami Hurricanes got in the College Football Playoff and faces at Texas A&M in the first round.

Here’s the better news:

We don’t have to spend the next eight months debating what happened, listening to conspiracy theories about the CFP committee, leveling favorite-son charges against Notre Dame and the Southeastern Conference and agreeing how everyone in the whole world has hated Miami either since Randal Hill ran up the Cotton Bowl tunnel or Jimmy Johnson ran up the score on everyone.

That’s left for Notre Dame now. It’s out of the playoffs. It can wallow in an offseason of finger-pointing, second-guessing and saying how much everyone loves Miami.

Hallelujah, and pass the scouting report on Texas A&M.

We get to move on. We don’t have to try to explain the unexplainable. And it is unexplainable that that the committee ranked Notre Dame above Miami every week over the past month and then flip-flopped the teams on the final vote despite that.

What changed, considering both were idle?

Was the joke on Notre Dame all along?

Was their some final shred of evidence like, uh, well, hmm … who cares? ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit tried to explain it rationally after the announcement and talked himself in such circles anyone listening got dizzy.

Again: What happened is Notre Dame’s concern. Miami is moving on to Texas A&M.

Miami fans will say justice won out. Maybe so. The Miami case for the playoffs, pro and con, came to this:

— Pro: It beat Notre Dame in the opener, 27-24. Isn’t head-to-head everything?

— Con: It lost two games against unranked opponents and didn’t even qualify for the ACC title game. How can a team that finished third in a bad football conference be top 10 in the country?

The full beauty of college football was on display. It’s an argument as much as a game on days like this. And most people pick their team and bend all logic toward it winning the argument.

Five-loss Duke beat Virginia team that entered 10-2 in that ACC championship game, by the way. Miami should send its former and current Duke coach Manny Diaz a bouquet of flowers, because a 11-2 and ACC champion Virginia might have taken a playoff spot.

That was one of two former Miami employees who helped the Coral Gables mothership. Texas Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt’s team won the Big 12 Championship and denied Brigham Young a spot in the playoff, too.

That game loomed big in the committee’s thinking.

“We felt like the way BYU performed in their championship game, a second loss to Texas Tech in a similar fashion, was worthy of Miami moving ahead of them in the rankings,” CFP selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek told ESPN. “Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungering for with Notre Dame and Miami.

“And you look at those two teams on paper, and they are almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, their results against their common opponents. But the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”

Whatever.

Clear all that from your mind now. It’s gone. It’s all good, too. It’s great, actually, if you’re a Hurricanes fan.

Miami played its best football over the past month. Its defense can be a force. Its offense has shown it can put up points. Mario Cristobal’s program has developed a handful of good, young players as this season progressed, too.

That means new talent on the most talented Miami team in decades. It would’ve been a shame if this team was undermined by bad losses to four-loss Louisville and four-loss SMU. It’s what I expected to happen.

Miami now can go show everyone how good they are starting with the Texas A&M game. That’s the good news.

The even better news is Miami fans have to turn in their everyone-hates-us card. There’s no conspiracy. There’s no favoritism. The joke, it really turns out, is on Notre Dame.

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