ACC Pushing For College Football Playoff Expansion After Fighting With Notre Dame

One of the stated motivations for expanding the College Football Playoff several years ago was to prevent deserving teams from being excluded. The four-team format, for example, could exclude one-loss teams that had a quality case for inclusion, or even in the case of the Florida State Seminoles, an undefeated team that had a poorly timed quarterback injury. 

In theory, expanding the playoff to 12 teams was supposed to eliminate many of the arguments that started as a result of a small field. Would there really be disagreement about the 13th best team in the country? Would anyone really care about a couple teams being left out to allow Group of 5 teams to participate? 

Turns out, the answer is yes, and absolutely yes. 

There's massive disagreement about who's part of the 12-team field this season. Alabama is in, after one of the worst losses of the season by any contending team to 5-7 FSU, then getting humiliated by Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. The Vanderbilt Commodores are out, despite finishing 10-2 in a difficult conference and beating Missouri and Tennessee. The Miami Hurricanes are in, after weeks of sitting outside the field. 

Then there's Notre Dame. The Irish lost two early games against top-10 quality opponents, losing by one to Texas A&M and three to Miami. Then they dominated the rest of their schedule, never dropping below 99 percent postgame win expectancy in the ensuing 10 games. But inexplicably, the committee moved them down two spots after blowing out Stanford and despite Alabama's unimpressive finish. 

RELATED: College Football Playoff System, Committee, Is A Joke And Needs A Complete Overhaul

It's not just being left out that's upsetting fans and the Irish administration, however. In the lead up to the committee making its selection, the ACC and ESPN-run ACC Network worked overtime to promote Miami. They replayed the week one game in a marathon format. And Irish AD Pete Bevaqua noticed. Then complained about it, considering their relationship with the ACC. Well, the ACC's trying to do damage control, and giving out some very bad suggestions in the process.

Notre Dame said no thanks to a bowl game after being left out of the CFB Playoff. (Photo by Ric Tapia/Getty Images)

ACC Suggestion Won't Fix College Football Playoff

Bevacqua was upset about the ACC's pro-Miami campaign. Very upset. 

"I understand they have to stand up for their teams in football," Bevacqua said. "We just think there's other ways to do it, and it has created damage. I'm not going to shy away from that, and that's just not me speaking. People a lot more important at this university than me feel the same way. So I think it has done some real damage, and I think the ACC knows that."

He said he brought up his concerns to the conference, and they kept it going regardless.

"Quite frankly, I was kind of expecting a phone call saying, 'Hey, sorry about that, it won't happen again,'" Bevacqua said. "But then it did happen again, and we started to communicate with the ACC, texts that I sent, emails that I sent, and it continued to happen."

Bevacqua wasn't done, saying that the program felt "targeted" and that the ACC went out of its way to hurt them.

"We were definitely being targeted," Bevacqua said. "And for better or for worse, we have a different relationship with the ACC than any other team in college football, other than the [football] teams that are in the ACC. Because we're in the ACC for 24 sports, we have a scheduling agreement with the ACC. The ACC does wonderful things for Notre Dame, but we bring tremendous football value to the ACC, and we didn't understand why you would go out of your way to try to damage us in this process."

Now ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips is trying to repair the relationship by openly advocating for…you guessed it, more College Football Playoff expansion.

"There’s such heartache at that cutline right now," Phillips said. "And, what I would say is, my barometer about what’s enough and what’s not enough is — if you’re leaving teams out of the Playoff that could win a national championship, then you don’t have the right number. We experienced it two seasons ago with Florida State, the only undefeated team to not make the Playoff at 13-0. And that’s when it was at four."

Here's the problem with this: it's kicking the can down the road and ignoring the actual, structural issues creating these problems.

Notre Dame Has Problems To Solve, So Does Committee

The Irish have their own issues to deal with. They've gotten preferential treatment, despite not having a direct relationship with a conference. They've suggested that there's another deal in place to guarantee them a spot in the playoff if they're in the top-12 moving forward. And they don't have to worry about a conference championship game potentially knocking them out, like, for example, the BYU Cougars who were dropped in the rankings after a blowout loss to a top-4 team.

But the committee has problems to fix too.

There's no consistency with how they rank teams or make playoff decisions. They punished BYU for losing to an elite Texas Tech team. They didn't punish Alabama for getting blown out by an elite Georgia team. The Group of 5 teams being included took away two spots from teams that, without question, played harder schedules.

Expanding to 16 teams won't fix those structural problems, it'll just push them further out. The arguments will stop being between which two-loss team has the better resume to which three-loss team has the better resume. No. 16 USC or No. 15 Utah would be upset about being left out in favor of Tulane or James Madison or so on. No. 16 Notre Dame would be upset. Those problems would continue, they'd just change the names involved.

What needs to happen is structural reform. Notre Dame should not get preferential treatment just because it's financially beneficial for the Irish to remain independent. We don't need to keep expanding the playoff to prevent arguments, we need to establish a clear set of objective criteria by which teams are measured against.

Publish a rating system, base it on a blend of forward-looking metrics and resume rankings, that anyone can check themselves. It's not hard, and it would make the process more transparent, instead of the laughable logical inconsistencies from biased committee members. Alabama's running game matters against Auburn, for some reason, but gaining -3 rushing yards against Georgia doesn't matter the next week. None of it makes sense. That's what needs to get fixed, not adding more teams.