With only a handful of weeks remaining in the college football season, those national rankings are beginning to finally mean something. As is typical, the latest standings have everyone talking, including Colin Cowherd and Joel Klatt, who had contrasting opinions.
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Cowherd and Klatt specifically looked at the current ranking of the Miami Hurricanes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Notre Dame, with a 9-2 record, is ranked No. 9 in the Week 13 list. The Hurricanes, who are also 9-2, are placed 12th.
The committee would have had its reasons to rank Miami below Notre Dame. Cowherd highlighted that while agreeing on how the teams are placed at the moment.
“Notre Dame is better than Miami today,” Cowherd remarked. “Ugly losses, that’s usually something that the people at these tables and the boards get right. You can’t lose to unranked teams if you’re a top-five or ten team. So, I’m okay with a much-improved team, by an inch, better than Miami. Miami still has to beat Pitt.”
Klatt also felt the decision to slot the Irish ahead of the Hurricanes isn’t inherently egregious. He even went as far as to say that he would pick Notre Dame to win against Miami on a neutral field, before critiquing the system.
Klatt is concerned that the committee is setting itself up for failure with how it has ranked the teams. “I think that two things can be true at once,” Klatt prefaced.
“If the committee’s objective is just to give us the best teams and they ask themselves, in the room, ‘Who wins on a neutral site this week?’ Yeah, I’d pick Notre Dame. Do I disagree with the ranking? No,” he continued.
“But the committee is setting itself up for a bit of a trap, and that trap is the head-to-head match-up against Miami. Because, if we’re not honoring games on the field, then what are we doing?” Added Klatt.
Much like with every other season, the selection committee is expected to produce a final list that will be deemed as hypocritical, if not at the very least, contradictory. Whether it’s the 2017 UCF Knights, the 2014 TCU Horned Frogs, or even the 2020 Texas A&M Aggies, there’s certainly no shortage of examples of the committee seemingly breaking its own rules while ranking teams to justify its decisions.
It’s also likely that former members of those programs were appreciative of Klatt’s willingness to call out the committee’s hesitancy to “honor” the right aspects of any given schedule.
“If they are just going to go by the eye test and say, ‘Well, who wins a neutral site this weekend?’ Then they are not going to honor head-to-head, and they are also going to devalue non-conference, blue-blood opponents, which is bad for the sport moving forward,” elaborated Klatt.
“It’s a tough position, because again, I don’t disagree with the ranking, but it also speaks to kind of the broken nature of this thing,” he added, before calling for the removal of the selection committee.
Klatt argued that an “access-based playoff” system would be preferable to the one we currently have in place. Unfortunately for him, as well as those programs above, it doesn’t seem as if the committee is planning on relinquishing power any time soon.
In other words, Hurricanes fans may want to consider traveling to Pittsburgh this weekend, because the program’s postseason aspirations may very well be on the line in the matchup.
