Notre Dame's argument for CFP snub is hypocritical, naive
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One certain casualty emerged from Sunday’s controversial reveal of the College Football Playoff bracket.
Bambi is dead.
Athletic director Pete Bevacqua and others in and around Notre Dame were apparently the last people in America oblivious to the easily manipulated and at times nonsensical nature of the CFP selection process.
He knows now. The ACC came out of the weekend with one member, Miami, in the playoff and one half-member, Notre Dame, taking its ball and leaving the playground.
When the Irish finally set aside their long list of grievances, though, they will realize they learned somethin: They put their faith in something which never existed in the first place.
We can make reasonable suggestions about improving this system. The ACC needed a more common-sense, pre-emptive approach to selecting its champion to avoid getting Duked. The selection committee should ditch athletic directors and add more completely unattached and unbiased members who could make ruthless arguments and votes free of concerns about optics or political fairness. Any number of nationally respected college football journalists and number crunchers would benefit the process.
Instead, the biggest takeaway from this whole episode is the astonishing naivete of Notre Dame and its athletic director.
Nothing exemplifies this more than the most interesting news since the bracket reveal. Bevacqua said Notre Dame recently signed a memorandum of understanding which, beginning next year, locks the Irish into the playoff field if it finishes in the top 12 of the rankings. (Or, top 13 in a playoff field of more than 14 teams.)
That MOU underscores both Notre Dame and Bevacqua's complete misunderstanding of this process and their awe-shucks suggestion the ACC somehow did them wrong.
The crux of Bevacqua's gripe centers on his school’s ranking prior to Selection Sunday.
If he thought those weekly reveals contributed any certainty to the final outcome, that's on him. The committee is under no such obligation. We are still waiting for the first rankings reveal in which a selection committee does not logically contradict itself somewhere on the list.
The weekly reveals are not just conveniently shown on television. They are a TV show. They exist to drum up conversation and debate. Since the committee can do whatever it wants on Selection Sunday, any notion of transparency is a fantasy.
That may be a jarring reality to accept, but it’s not a new one. It held true during the four-team playoff era. It will hold true after the next inevitable playoff expansion.
Notre Dame also could proactively put itself in position to unquestionably win its way into the field. Instead, it has not merely accepted its position as an independent within a playoff system which rewards conference champions, it demanded that position. Former athletic director Jack Swarbrick agreed to it when he helped craft the very structure Notre Dame now attacks.
Many other two- or even three-loss teams can go to a conference championship game and have their playoff entrance stamped no questions asked. Notre Dame is the only relevant team which looked at the disadvantage of independence and said “Yes please.” That means, once in a while, the whim of the committee will put someone else in the field over a deserving Irish team.
In lieu of joining the ACC or Big Ten or some other conference, Notre Dame went another route. Per that agreement it recently signed, by finishing in the top 12 of the rankings, it will receive a conference champion-like automatic bid. (One which did not need to actually win a conference championship game, obviously.)
Which brings us to the scorn now directed at its limited football partners in the ACC.
Bevacqua said the ACC went too far in its promotion of Miami in the head-to-head discussion about the final at-large playoff spot. In his mind, because the school and the conference engage in a mutually beneficial scheduling arrangement in football and full membership in two dozen other sports, the league should not have played favorites.
Let's set aside for a moment the hypocrisy of expecting equal football allegiance without actually committing to it.
Consider a future 12-team playoff after Notre Dame's MOU goes into effect. Hypothetically, and as is usually the case, any Group of Five champions rank outside the top 12. The final at-large spot comes down to either Notre Dame or an equally successful non-champion from the ACC.
Now imagine the committee decides that other team — Miami, Clemson, South Carolina, whoever — rightly deserves the No. 11 spot over Notre Dame. Will the Irish set aside their automatic bid in deference to its conference chum? Isn't that what a good and fully committed conference partner might do? Wouldn't that be the fair approach?
Of course not. Prior to all of this bellyaching, Notre Dame established an agreement which will absolutely bump aside a more or equally deserving ACC team the first chance it gets.
One could imagine the AD at Florida State or Virginia Tech or North Carolina saying something like: "Why put these young student-athletes through these false emotions just to pull the rug out from underneath them … 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."
You don’t have to imagine Bevacqua saying that. He just did — in an interview with Yahoo! Sports.
However, that scenario presented above will never happen. And that truly is evidence of the pollyannaish attitude Notre Dame apparently takes into these football decisions.
Put yourself in the selection committee war room on Selection Sunday. By consensus, you feel power conference Team A deserves the No. 11 spot — the final at-large spot — ahead of No. 12 Notre Dame. Do you really think the committee will rank the Irish 12th, knowing it will usurp their actual rankings and foment considerable outrage about the system — not to mention resentment of the Fighting Irish?
No, the committee will do one of two things prior to the final episode of that season’s TV series. It will either bite its lip and put the Irish at No. 11, or it will find a reason to put them at No. 13. The 12-team playoff could go on for another 50 years without one instance of Notre Dame finishing No. 12 and bumping out another power conference team.
Somehow, Notre Dame signed that agreement under the impression the committee cannot adjust the margins of the rankings to reflect what it considers the cleanest outcome.
Notre Dame has existed as a power broker in college football for decades. That influence carried more weight in the olden days when the sport was regionally splintered, the championship process completely imaginary.
Yet somehow, it went into the weekend with a complete misunderstanding of how this process has been working for well over a decade now.
"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,” Bevacqua told Yahoo! Sports.
Welcome to the real world, Pete.
Nathan Baird is an enterprise reporter and covers Purdue for IndyStar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Pete Bevacqua Notre Dame football argument for CFP snub is hypocritical
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