After 2 early losses, Notre Dame is facing an uphill climb to make CFP — even if it runs the table
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Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman likes to talk about a football season in terms of what’s guaranteed.
You’re guaranteed today’s practice. You’re guaranteed the 12 games on your schedule. Anything beyond that isn’t worth talking about.
“That’s always been my message is stay in the moment,” Freeman said Monday at his weekly news conference. “The only way to win the moment is you have to be right in the moment. It’s not worrying about the next opponent or (whether) we have to go undefeated. That’s wasting time on an uncertain future.”
Freeman is right. The future is uncertain for every one of us, and we would all be better off in whatever we do by spending more time on what's right in front of us instead of what’s around the corner.
But at the same time, everything in sports is built on projection and probability. That’s especially true for Notre Dame and its unique relationship with the College Football Playoff.
When the 12-team model was built — with former Irish athletics director Jack Swarbrick right in the middle of that process — the projection was that Notre Dame’s independent status would be an advantage. A year ago, that turned out to be the reality.
But this season? Not having a conference schedule to fall back on could be what keeps the Irish out.
“Every year the journey’s different,” Freeman said.
It’s ironic that at this point in the schedule a year ago, Notre Dame was close to written off because of a loss to Northern Illinois. It became the ultimate outlier in a season where the Irish won 13 straight and reached the national championship game.
This year, even at 0-2, Notre Dame should still be regarded as a CFP-quality team. A three-point road loss to No. 4 Miami and a one-point home loss to No. 10 Texas A&M aren’t disqualifying results, especially in the current era.
But the Irish face a major roadblock to actual CFP contention: Their remaining schedule.
Among the 10 opponents Notre Dame will face in — as Freeman would say — the games they’re guaranteed this year, only one is currently ranked in the Associated Press poll.
That’s Southern Cal, which snuck in this week at No. 25. As for the rest, it’s hard to envision upcoming games against Arkansas, Boise State, NC State or Navy moving the needle that much for the selection committee.
One of the big benefits of the 12-team system for Notre Dame is that a one- or two-loss season should be enough to make the playoff in a normal year. But if this Notre Dame team is sitting there at 10-2, is there going to be enough on the résumé to leapfrog a team from the SEC or the Big Ten that had better wins?
“How do we make sure we’re focused on getting this first (win)? That’s the only thing we control,” Freeman said. “Focus on the things that are guaranteed, and that’s right now.”
But unfortunately for Freeman, that aspect of his job is intertwined with the reality that crafting the right schedule for playoff contention is at least half the battle.
And it’s way more art than science because you’re mostly just guessing how good certain opponents are going to be years in the future.
Before he retired, Swarbrick often said that Notre Dame spent more time on scheduling than any school in the country because it had to, and he was right about that. But over time, his views on how to build the right schedule evolved a bit.
At the beginning of the four-team playoff era, he was adamant that Notre Dame needed to play one of the toughest schedules in the country because it was a disadvantage not to be in a conference.
Ironically, though, scheduling only played a major factor in keeping Notre Dame out once. That was 2021 when the Irish went 11-1 but didn’t have any standout wins and ultimately lost out on the No. 4 spot to Cincinnati, which had beaten Notre Dame head-to-head.
If you look at how Notre Dame’s schedule lines up in the 12-team era, the philosophy generally seems to be playing one top-level SEC program per year, either Clemson or Miami (or sometimes both) as part of its agreement with the ACC and its traditional games against Southern Cal and Navy. The rest of the schedule could shade a tad easier or more difficult depending on the year.
(It’s also noteworthy that Notre Dame and USC do not yet have a long-term agreement after next season to continue the series, which has been played every year since 1926 except for a four-year break during World War II and 2020 due to COVID. Hopefully they’ll work it out.)
Had the results from the two weeks of this season fallen in Notre Dame’s favor, an easier slate the rest of the way wouldn’t be a problem. But now, it looks like bad luck to have frontloaded the schedule while upcoming opponents like Boise State and even Syracuse look like they may be worse than projected.
None of this is to suggest Notre Dame drop everything and call Greg Sankey to ask for SEC membership. When college football finally accepted the 12-team playoff, Notre Dame officials felt as though it guaranteed their ability to stay independent for a long time to come — or at least until some type of super league forms among the 30 or 40 most valuable programs in the country.
But if Notre Dame goes 10-2 and misses the playoff this year because it didn’t have enough quality wins, the blame should mostly fall on those who made this schedule and not as much on the players or coaches who lost to two quality teams by a total of four points.
Freeman may truly believe his job is to keep everyone’s attention on the current moment, especially now that his team must fight out of an 0-2 hole. But without a conference affiliation to fall back on, projecting which opponents are going to provide schedule strength in the future might be more important than anyone at Notre Dame previously realized.
