Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1541906
20 JANUARY 2026 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY ERIC HANSEN T he statement the Notre Dame football program issued Dec. 7, which played like an eloquent, 49-word equivalent of a middle finger to the College Football Playoff se- lection committee and the bowl system, at the time felt decidedly off-brand. In Marcus Freeman's world, you don't roll out "choose hard" as a mantra for Notre Dame football and a lifestyle to match it, and then bail on it when life gets too hard. You make the most out of the bowl opportunity, however irrele- vant it is to college football's big picture. And you do it because it could have been relevant to Notre Dame's big picture. Not the outcome necessarily, but how you go about developing your team for 2026, how you frame the Col- lege Football Playoff snub on the re- cruiting trail, how you spend extra time pursuing and landing the right transfer portal prospects. And how you transcend adversity, no matter whether Notre Dame's exclusion from the field reeks more of corruption, collusion, incompetence or some com- bination thereof. All of that makes Associated Press No. 9/CFP No. 11 Notre Dame's deci- sion to, via social media, opt out of the bowl picture, likely a Pop-Tarts Bowl matchup with No. 12/12 BYU (11-2), feel like adding a self-inflicted wound to the oozing, pus-filled gem CFP selection committee chair Hunter Yurachek de- livered a few hours earlier. And yet none of that was refuted dur- ing a team meeting in which Notre Dame (10-2) ceded its theoretical Dec. 27 spot in Orlando to No. 24/22 Georgia Tech (9-3), which played SEC champ Geor- gia, incidentally, much more competi- tively than CFP invitee Alabama did just one week later. THE PLAYERS' VOICES ARE HEARD What was the bottom line then, when it came to the Irish joining Iowa State, Kansas State and even 5-7 Rutgers in the no-bowls-for-us camp? According to a source, Notre Dame's player leadership felt that with all the impending individual opt-outs — for NFL Draft and injury recovery reasons — the 2025 Fighting Irish football team that essentially played 10 straight elim- ination games over the final 11 weeks of the season "would not accurately be represented" by the one that showed up to play in Camping World Stadium. Not that the version that could have played couldn't be competitive, but the players felt like it did no service to the legacy of the 2025 team to play. Freeman and the Notre Dame admin- istration bought into the reasoning, and thus, the Irish pushed away a bowl invite and a bowl paycheck for the first time since 2009. That's when the Notre Dame administration made the hierarchical TAKING A STAND Why Notre Dame walked away from a bowl after the CFP snub, and what needs to come next