The College Football Playoff field is set with the unveiling of the 12-team bracket Sunday, and everybody around the sport seems to have a strong opinion on what the selection committee got right and wrong and what needs to change moving forward.
With 8-5 Duke winning the ACC championship, it was already known that two Group of 5 teams were going to make the playoffs with the five highest-ranked conference championships receiving automatic berths. But that hasn’t stopped the vitriol over both Tulane and James Madison making it while Notre Dame and Texas (not to mention BYU and Vanderbilt) were left out.
Then there’s the divided reaction over Miami getting the last at-large spot over Notre Dame despite the Fighting Irish being ranked two spots higher to start the week and neither team playing a game this weekend to change their resumes. (Of course, those resumes have all along included the Hurricanes beating the Irish head-to-head in Week 1, but that didn’t seem to matter until now.)
Meanwhile, Alabama didn’t move at all from the No. 9 line despite losing the SEC championship game 28-7 to Georgia, while BYU (which was a spot ahead of Miami in the Tuesday rankings) got bounced from the field for losing the Big 12 championship game to Texas Tech.
It wouldn’t be college football without debate, dissent and disagreement, though.
Let’s break down those matters further along with other thoughts on the bracket.
The field is set! The College Football Playoff bracket has been released 🏆
— teamfb (@teamfbseven) December 7, 2025
Did the committee get it right? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/6J9A1MmkAr
Most Controversial CFP Decision
The debate about Notre Dame and Miami had been building for weeks, and of course it was going to come down to those two teams for the final at-large spot and put the CFP committee in the toughest of spots.
Rather, the CFP committee put itself in the toughest of spots by waiting until the very end to factor the Hurricanes’ 27-24 Week 1 win over the Fighting Irish into the rankings.
In prior weeks, CFP chair Hunter Yurachek, the athletic director at Arkansas, explained the head-to-head result not being the ultimate factor because the committee deemed there to be a significant enough gap overall between Notre Dame (which lost to ranked Miami and Texas A&M early) and Miami (which lost to unranked Louisville and SMU in the middle of the season).
Both teams finished the season strong and the gap in the rankings continued to shrink from Notre Dame at 10 and Miami at 18 in initial CFP rankings after Week 10 to 9 vs. 15, then 9 vs. 13, 9 vs. 12 and 10 vs. 12 in the penultimate rankings Tuesday.
Then No. 11 BYU got blown out in the Big 12 championship game, removing any buffer between Notre Dame and Miami, at which point the committee clearly realized it could not justify superseding a head-to-head result.
“That was the debate we had in our committee room into the early morning hours and again as the sun was coming up,” Yurachek said Sunday on ESPN. “And the first move in that was 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. And 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’re almost equal when 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.
“I charged the committee members to go back and watch that game again — the Miami-Notre Dame game — and we got some interesting debate from our coaches on what that game looked like as we watched it. And with that in mind, we gave Miami the nod over Notre Dame into that 10 spot.”
Rece Davis continued to grill Yurachek as to why that evaluation changed only now, with neither team playing a game this week, but he didn’t get much more out of Yurachek to further the explanation.
.@CFBPlayoff Selection Committee chair Hunter Yurachek breaks down what went into the decision for 10-seed Miami to make the playoffs 👀 pic.twitter.com/DFo7K18Wna
— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) December 7, 2025
The committee is going to get vilified for the handling of this matter, but here’s a hot take — they weren’t wrong in their initial evaluation and it’s not totally their fault that it unfolded in such a controversial matter.
Notre Dame did look like a considerably better team when the first CFP rankings came out. Miami had just lost for the second time in three games to an unranked opponent while the Fighting Irish were steamrolling opponents at that point. That head-to-head result all the way back on Aug. 31 was a three-point game in Miami won on a field goal in the final minute — not exactly an overwhelming statement that the Hurricanes were a clearly better football program than the Irish.
It was absolutely sensible that game wouldn’t decide things for the committee when the two teams weren’t really close in the rankings — Miami didn’t deserve to leap over all the other teams in between just because it beat Notre Dame.
Then the worst-possible scenario played out for the committee, at least relative to its position on this matter, as all those teams initially in between Notre Dame and Miami either fell out of the playoff picture (Utah, Virginia, Louisville, Georgia Tech), leaped ahead (Oklahoma), took a setback (Texas) or got leaped over (Vanderbilt), while later Alabama and BYU became the buffer only for the Tide to get flipped ahead of the Irish (that’s never been fully clarified) and the Cougars to get knocked down after the loss Saturday.
If the committee was decisive on Alabama being the best of those three teams, then it could only be a direct debate about Notre Dame and Miami, at which point this had to happen.
It’s wild and awkward how it played out, but that doesn’t mean any of it was necessarily wrong.
Most Surprising CFP Seeding Decisions
Aside from deciding which team got the final at-large berth and the No. 10 seed, there were really only two other decisions to make and both centered on how much weight to put on the conference championship results.
First, there was a decision to make at No. 2 between Ohio State and Georgia. The Buckeyes (12-1) lost 13-10 to Indiana in the Big Ten championship game, which obviously merited flipping spots at 1-2 with the Hoosiers (13-0). But that’s as far as Ohio State dropped, even with Georgia (12-1) rolling over Alabama 28-7 in the SEC championship game.
Given that Georgia avenged its only regular-season loss in such a decisive statement win and that it finished with wins over two playoff teams (Ole Miss and Alabama) along with ranked Texas and Georgia Tech, the Bulldogs deserved the No. 2 seed. Ohio State’s only notable wins were over Texas and Michigan.
The other decision was what to do with Alabama (10-3). No three-loss team earned an at-large berth last year, but the committee decided to completely ignore the lopsided loss Saturday and kept the Tide right where they were — No. 9.
Notre Dame fans can be mad about the committee flipping Miami ahead of the Irish, but they are also upset about finishing behind Alabama as well.
It’s harder to have a definitive opinion on that matter. Treating the conference championship games like a bonus seems right — it shouldn’t be an advantage to miss the conference title game and avoid the potential for an extra loss. But it’s still a data point, and if it’s as lopsided as Georgia-Alabama game was it’s surprising that it carried no weight at all.
Some will claim that there was a double-standard with BYU dropping below Miami after losing the Big 12 championship game, but the Cougars’ only edge on the Hurricanes was being a one-loss team. Ultimately, BYU’s only had one marquee win — over Utah — and got blown out twice (29-7 and then 34-7 Saturday) by the only playoff team it faced in Texas Tech.
The Cougars don’t have a justifiable complaint in this case.
Most Intriguing CFP Games, Potential Matchups
Two of the four first-round games set for Dec. 19/20 are projected to be blowouts, with No. 6 Ole Miss (11-1) a 17.5-point home favorite over No. 11 Tulane (11-2) and No. 5 Oregon (11-1) a 21.5-point home favorite over No. 12 James Madison (12-1).
The reality is Ole Miss already played Tulane this year, beating the Green Wave 45-10 back in September, and JMU only played one Power 4 opponent, losing 28-14 at Louisville.
The other two first-round games are intriguing, though.
No. 8 Oklahoma (10-2) gets a rematch with No. 9 Alabama (10-3) after beating the Tide, 23-21, last month in Tuscaloosa. This time the game will be in Norman, Oklahoma, and yet Alabama is a 1.5-point favorite.
That’s our pick for the best game of the opening round, but No. 10 Miami (10-2) at No. 7 Texas A&M (11-1) is certainly intriguing as well. The Aggies are a 4.5-point home favorite, and if Miami loses the fervor over Notre Dame’s exclusion will only amplify.
As for the most intriguing potential matchup in the Dec. 31/Jan. 1 quarterfinals, it’s No. 4 Texas Tech (12-1) vs. No. 5 Oregon.
Changes Surely Coming To CFP
It took a perfect storm to get two G5 teams in the 12-team playoff field, and the ACC’s debacle of a tiebreaker that placed five-loss Duke ahead of Miami, Georgia Tech, SMU and Pittsburgh into the conference championship game is to blame.
The ACC used opponents’ conference strength of schedule as the tiebreaker in that scenario instead of the logical answer — the CFP rankings, which would have had Miami playing Virginia. In that scenario, the Hurricanes could have claimed the automatic berth (that instead went to a second G5 team as James Madison was ranked higher than Duke) and Notre Dame would be in the field.
Yes, Notre Dame literally has the ACC’s convoluted tiebreaker to blame for its playoff snub.
But also, there’s no way the powers in college football are going to allow a scenario like this to happen again with a second G5 team making it while the likes of Notre Dame, Texas, Vanderbilt and BYU sit home.
Nick Saban took aim at this during his appearance on ESPN on Sunday.
“I think the fact of the matter is all three of those teams should have gotten in and deserved the right to play in the College Football Playoff,” Saban said of Miami, Notre Dame and Texas. “For years now, we have kept tweaking the criteria of how we select teams to be in the playoff, whether it was a two-team BCS, whether it’s a four-team playoff and now 12-team playoff, but really I think you’re going to have two teams in the playoff — no disrespect to the Group of 5 — that are nowhere near ranked as highly as some other teams that are much better than them.
“And I think that may be something we can learn from this because to me this has got to be devastating for Notre Dame’s team not to get an opportunity to play in the playoffs, that we can learn something from this that will help us come up with a little better criteria of trying to make sure we get the best 12 teams in the playoff. … I think you have 10 teams that are getting evaluated on one set of criteria in this year’s polling, and you have two teams that are getting in the playoffs evaluated on a whole different set of criteria based on the highest five conference champions getting in,” Saban said. “And I think some kind of way we’ve got to bring that to balance that we shouldn’t be evaluating teams in the playoff with a different set of criteria.”
