Miami is in. Notre Dame is out. And Joey Galloway wants to know why the committee waited until the last possible moment to make that call.
The Hurricanes jumped the Fighting Irish in Sunday’s final College Football Playoff rankings, claiming the No. 10 seed and the last at-large spot in the field. Miami had been behind Notre Dame in every previous ranking this season, despite beating the Irish 27-24 back in Week 1.
When the flip finally happened, Galloway didn’t hold back on ESPN’s selection show.
“This is very strange to me,” Galloway said. “And again, Rece, you mentioned earlier that they hadn’t compared these two teams. Well, why not? They should have absolutely compared these two teams. We had a ranking come out on Tuesday. If they were going to flip these two teams that did not play, they should have done it on Tuesday.”
The ESPN crew reacts to Miami getting into the College Football Playoff over Notre Dame. 🏈 🎙️ #CFP pic.twitter.com/QyrWN6hrFh
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 7, 2025
Booger McFarland tried to defend the committee, falling back on the idea that Sunday was different because they were now looking at complete bodies of work with the entire season in the books. That’s when Galloway stopped him in his tracks.
“Today doesn’t change their résumé,” Galloway argued. “It was complete when we had the ranking on Tuesday. And so if we’re going to make sense of this as we’re trying to watch it play out, if you want it to make sense, then make sense. If the résumé was done on Tuesday and on Tuesday, Notre Dame was a better football team, and the résumé hasn’t changed a lick, two teams were sitting on the couch, somehow that flipped.”
The committee will probably say they wanted to see how championship weekend played out before locking in the final bracket. But Miami and Notre Dame weren’t playing on Saturday. Nothing that happened in any conference championship game changed the head-to-head result from August or altered either team’s record. If the committee needed more time to evaluate these two teams, what exactly were they waiting to see? What new information became available between Tuesday and Sunday that justified flipping them?
Waiting until Selection Sunday to suddenly decide it mattered makes the committee look indecisive at best and incompetent at worst. Either they didn’t know what they wanted to do, or they were buying time for reasons they haven’t explained. Neither is reassuring.
Miami will play Texas A&M in College Station in the first round. Notre Dame will watch from home. The Hurricanes probably deserved the spot based on beating the Irish head-to-head, but the way the committee handled it undermines whatever credibility they were trying to build. If Miami was always going to get in over Notre Dame, the committee should have just said so on Tuesday instead of waiting until the last minute to change their minds. Making the call on Sunday doesn’t make them look thorough. It makes them look like they didn’t figure out what they were doing until they absolutely had to.
Which is exactly what Galloway was getting at on Sunday afternoon, even if the committee isn’t going to explain itself.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.