The College Football Selection Show on ESPN, featuring Rece Davis, Nick Saban, Kirk Herbstreit, and Chris Fowler. Photo Credit: ESPN Photo Credit: ESPN
By Matt Clapp on

The College Football Playoff field was revealed on Sunday on ESPN. The big stories to emerge were that Alabama made the field as the No. 9 seed, and Miami made the tournament as the No. 10 seed over Notre Dame, despite Notre Dame being ahead of Miami in every previous ranking this season.

The CFP selection show featured various ESPN personalities offering reactions to the field, including the network’s top play-by-play announcer, Chris Fowler.

Fowler told host Rece Davis, “This is a bracket that’s going to be talked about forever.”

“Chris, you’ve watched this for years; we’ve both covered this sport for a long time,” Davis said to Fowler. “I think this is probably as controversial and difficult a decision as we’ve had in the entire [College Football Playoff] era.”

“I agree, Rece,” Fowler said. “This is a bracket that’s going to be talked about forever. Really.”

“And not just because Notre Dame got excluded,” Fowler explained. “But because of the framework that created the choices the committee had to make. And [Nick Saban] talks about tweaks. There was a tweak after last season, what people didn’t like about it. There’s going to be something more than a tweak, I think, going forward. Because, all of a sudden, inclusivity, which most people in this sport is a pretty good idea. Even Greg Sankey, the commissioner of the deepest conference (SEC), thinks that you can’t have Group of Five conferences play and have it mean absolutely nothing the entire season if there’s not a possibility of getting into the CFP. So, inclusivity sounds good until teams like Notre Dame, and Texas, and Vanderbilt get squeezed out. Then people have a serious problem with it.”

“But this is one that we’re going to talk about for a long, long time,” Fowler continued. “If you’re Notre Dame, you’re crushed. They were worried about this. I know they projected confidence. There was a lot of unease on the part of Marcus Freeman and others because they saw them drop last week. And now, in consecutive weeks without playing, they have dropped in the rankings. And it ends up costing them despite a 10-game winning streak to finish the season.”

“Having said that, I have no problem with Miami getting in,” Fowler elaborated. “Based on a head-to-head, even though it was early in the season. They won that game at the line of scrimmage, held perhaps the best player in the sport, Jeremiyah Love — who could win the Heisman and will certainly be there as a finalist in New York on Saturday — to 33 yards on 10 carries. So, that was real. It was a late field goal that won it, but it still matters, and I think has to matter or there’s no incentive to schedule any kind of meaningful nonconference game.”

“That’s not the committee’s job to protect that, or the committee’s job to protect with a sentimental eye, conference championship games,” Fowler said in his closing comments. “But those are also in danger, as we know, going forward.”

About Matt Clapp

Matt is an editor/writer at The Comeback and Awful Announcing.

He can be reached by email at mclapp@thecomeback.com.

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