Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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said. "And we didn't use the head-to-head metric to compare Miami and Louisville — Louisville a team who had beaten Miami. "But not until they really got in close proximity side-by-side with the move with BYU were we able to evaluate just those two teams side-by-side. We always had someone between them, whether it was previously Ala- bama and BYU, and then just BYU in the last week." Yurachek seem- ingly shifted from d i sc u ss i n g M i a m i and Louisville to Mi- ami and Notre Dame in his answer. But his M i a m i - L o u i sv i l l e comparison doesn't track with what happened. When the first College Football Playoff rankings were released Nov. 4, the committee ranked a 7-1 Louisville team at No. 15 and a 6-2 Miami team at No. 18. The Cardinals beat Miami 24-21 Oct. 17, and Louisville was rightly ahead of Miami. Perhaps Yurachek meant to highlight the following week's rankings when 7-2 Mi- ami jumped to No. 15 and 7-2 Louisville dropped to No. 20 after a 29-26 over- time loss to Cal. But this is information Yurachek should be better at articulating when everyone wants an explanation. Yurachek confirmed that Notre Dame and Miami had been in the same group of teams that were being evaluated against each other prior to this weekend. That's when Davis asked again why Notre Dame and Miami had to be ranked side-by-side without a team between them for the head-to- head matchup in August to be the determining factor between the two. "As I mentioned last week in last week's rankings, we thought Notre Dame was bet- ter than BYU and deserved to be ranked higher than BYU," Yura- chek said. "We thought BYU de- served to be ranked higher than Miami, and that's the way that laid out. After the championship game in the Big 12 and the way BYU performed again against Texas Tech, we felt like Miami de- served to be ranked ahead of BYU, and then you have the direct head-to- head comparison of those teams, Miami and Notre Dame, sitting respectively at 10 and 11 in our poll." Miami became the ACC's lone represen- tative in the College Football Playoff field after Duke beat Virginia, 27-20, in overtime in the ACC Championship Game Dec. 6. The Blue Devils, who owned an 8-5 record, weren't ranked high enough for the ACC to earn one of the five spots reserved for the highest-ranked conference champions. Those spots went to No. 1 seed Indiana (Big Ten), No. 3 seed Georgia (SEC), No. 4 seed Texas Tech (Big 12), No. 11 seed Tulane (American) and No. 12 seed James Madi- son (Sun Belt). Tulane and James Madison were ranked No. 20 and No. 24, respec- tively, and Duke didn't make the top 25. Yurachek pushed back when asked if the discussion about Miami and Notre Dame was impacted at all by the fact that the ACC wouldn't have landed a team in the playoff if Miami was excluded. "It had absolutely no impact," Yurachek said. "Our charge as a selection commit- tee is to rank the top 25 teams, and then you peel out the five highest conference champions and the seven at-large teams, and that's what we did to fill out that bracket, and Miami ended up being one of the seven highest at-large teams, and that's why they're in the playoff. It's not because the ACC wasn't otherwise go- ing to have a repre- sentative." T h o u g h B Y U dropped one spot with its loss in the Big 12 Champion- s h i p G a m e , A l a - bama wasn't dinged for losing 28-7 to Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. Alabama (11-3) is the only three-loss team to make the playoff field, and it did so as the No. 9 seed. Alabama won 24-21 at Georgia Sept. 27, which must have played a role in the decision to not drop the Crimson Tide. Apparently Alabama's 31-17 loss at Florida State, which finished the sea- son 5-7, didn't matter as much as Notre Dame's loss that same weekend. "We evaluated all of those confer- ence championship games, and it felt like in the end, regardless of Alabama's performance yesterday, their body of work in those first 12 games where they had probably the best win, arguably this season, winning at No. 3 Georgia, having a win against Vanderbilt, wins against Tennessee as well, and their strength of schedule was the highest in the top 11," Yurachek said. "And we felt like in spite of their performance yes- terday in the conference championship, they deserved to stay in that 9 spot." ✦ "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, the results against their common opponents, but the one metric we had to fall back on again was the head-to-head." YURACHEK BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM JANUARY 2026 19