This Week in Our Dumb, Beautiful Sport: Indiana is No. 1, Notre Dame Sent Packing, and College Football Playoff Gets Messier Than Ever

By Ryan Ginn on December 8, 2025 at 9:10 am
Notre Dame got what it deserved
Matt Cashore-Imagn Images
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Welcome to This Week in Our Dumb Beautiful Sport, a weekly look at the chaos that reigns over the most perfectly imperfect world of college football.

The College Football Playoff is here! Everyone is furious! There's no better time to be a fan of the dumbest, most beautiful sport on the planet. 

NOTRE DAME GOT WHAT IT DESERVED (AND BAMA WOULD HAVE TOO)

In what ended up being a three-team race for two spots, Alabama and Miami (Fla.) survived and Notre Dame was left on the outside looking in. The Irish responded by taking their ball and going home, lest they accidentally be forced to play a team with a pulse in a bowl game. 

I'm apparently in the extreme minority here, but Notre Dame has absolutely no reason to feel like it got robbed. And, to be clear, I would have said the exact same thing about Alabama if it had been knocked out. Notre Dame played two good teams this year. It lost both. There is nothing on its schedule it can point to as evidence that it would do anything in a playoff. And it's not like those games were against Ohio State or Indiana. Miami (who didn't make its conference championship game) and Texas A&M (who didn't have to face No. 4 Georgia,  No. 6 Ole Miss, No. 8 Oklahoma, No. 9 Alabama, or No. 14 Vanderbilt and lost soundly to No. 13 Texas) are definitively on the low end of the College Football Playoff resume spectrum. Nobody thinks either one of those teams is going to make a run. Their best win is against a team playing in the Alamo Bowl. I don't think it's any sort of stretch to say that at least 30 teams could have gone 10-2 against Notre Dame's schedule. To do so, you'd only have to go 1-2 against Miami (Fla.), Texas A&M, and USC. 

Alabama had just as much of a case to miss the playoff. The Crimson Tide are simply not a good football team. They spent November struggling to put away LSU and Auburn, two terrible teams with interim coaches. They were not even a little bit competitive against Georgia. I don't for one second buy the argument that they should have been immune from missing the playoff because they played in a conference championship game. I haven't seen a single person argue that Ohio State should have stayed No. 1 after losing to Indiana. But by the same logic people use to defend Alabama, that's what you'd have to believe about Ohio State and Indiana. 

At the end of the day, I really don't understand the immense amount of hand wringing going on -- at least in terms of the outcome. We'll get to the process aspect of it all in a second. All of the bubble teams are flawed. Ten of the playoff teams had nothing to worry about on Sunday because they had already done enough. The ones who left it up to the committee had nobody to blame but themselves.

THE CFP PROCESS IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST

The CFP needs to change the way it votes and ranks teams. Instead of just combining all the rankings and adding them up, they need to collectively reach a group consensus one team at a time in a way that flows logically. If that's asking too much of them, find other people. Juries reach a group consensus every weekday in courthouses throughout the country. 

That brings me to my next point. Someone needs to pay ESPN whatever it would take to amend the contract in a way that forces them to stop airing the weekly CFP ranking shows. It's ruining the sport. I'm going to try not to re-litigate this again because I've already written about it previously, but you cannot have someone go on national TV and try to explain the actions of a group of individuals who vote by anonymous ballot as though there is a consensus. It would be no different than forcing an AP Poll voter to explain why the voters as a whole ranked a team a certain way. That part would no longer be an issue if we change the way the committee makes decisions, but there are still other problems. Over the course of the season, information we have about each team changes, often quite dramatically. LSU vs. Clemson was a top-10 matchup in Week 1. Both barely made bowl games. Publishing rankings on a week-to-week basis leads the committee (and the media and fans) to think on a week-to-week basis rather than looking at the big picture. It needs to stop. 

WE LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE INDIANA FOOTBALL IS NO. 1

I understand that this is... whatever the opposite of preaching to the choir is... but I still think it's worth appreciating just how genuinely insane it is that Indiana is the No. 1 college football team in the country. Indiana has been playing football since 1887. Their first 10-win season came in 2024. That's 70 years after Ohio State's first 10-win season. From 1994 to 2014, they made one bowl game. During that 20-year stretch, the coach who looked most capable of fixing them almost immediately developed a fatal brain tumor. The only two times they previously won the conference came in 1945 (immediately after World War II) and 1967, when they were tied in the standings with Minnesota at 9-1 but went to the Rose Bowl due to a tiebreaker that rewarded the team that had gone the longer amount of time without playing in the Rose Bowl.

All of this is to say that Indiana's 13-10 win over Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship on Saturday continues one of the most unbelievable college football stories I can remember. After a century of primarily serving as a doormat for other Midwest teams, the Hoosiers are the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff. 

"We’re going to go in the playoffs as the No. 1 seed," Hoosiers coach Curt Cignetti said. "And a lot of people probably thought that wasn’t possible. But when you get the right people and you have a plan and they love one another and play for one another and they commit, anything’s possible. And I think that’s what you saw happen here."

THE ACC GOES FULL ACC

In an outcome that could only happen to the ACC, a 7-5 Duke team beat 10-2 Virginia to win the ACC Championship and put the conference in severe jeopardy of missing out of the playoff entirely. This could have easily been avoided through a number of scenarios; namely, using better tiebreakers to determine who plays in the game. But since they don't own a time machine, they should have tried the next-best option: simply changing the rules the week before the game and putting Miami (Fla.) against the Cavaliers instead of having a 7-5 team play.

I can already hear the uproar, but it's their championship -- they can do what they want. The Big Ten did this in 2020 when they eliminated the minimum game requirement in the final weeks of the regular season to prevent Ohio State from being unfairly knocked out due to Michigan canceling its game against the Buckeyes. Had the Big Ten not done so, it would have been Indiana vs. Northwestern in the conference championship despite the fact that the Hoosiers lost to the unbeaten Buckeyes. Instead, the Buckeyes played, won, made the playoff, smoked Clemson, and made it to the national championship game. 

Luckily for the ACC, the CFP committee noticed just in time that perhaps a 10-2 team that beat another 10-2 team should be ranked ahead of the one it beat. 

PENN STATE STUMBLES INTO A DECENT HIRE

Things were not looking good for Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft the day BYU coach Kalani Sitake decided to stay in Provo rather than becoming Penn State's next head coach. Despite getting a head start on everyone, the Nittany Lions spent the rest of fall getting coaches around the country hundreds of millions of dollars in raises and contract extensions. They did not make a hire in time for the early signing period, leading to a disastrous situation when only two recruits signed with the Nittany Lions. 

Somehow, things ended up OK. Penn State turned its attention to Iowa State coach Matt Campbell, and the rest moved quickly from there. It's not often that the word you'd use for both sides of a coaching hire is "relieved," but that's probably applicable here. Although I am very much on the record of thinking Campbell was overrated during the time period when sportswriters were pushing him for openings at some of the best jobs in the country, Penn State certainly could have done a lot worse. As for Campbell, I imagine he was growing increasingly resigned to being stuck in Ames forever given that the schools he probably most coveted -- the Midwest's best programs -- all seemed like they'd probably not be coming open anytime soon. Ohio State, Penn State, and Notre Dame all made the CFP semifinals last season and Michigan won a national championship the year before that. And even when the Penn State job did come open, about a dozen coaches were linked it it before he ended up being hired. Ultimately, a disaster of a process still led to a decent result. 

Can Ohio State learn from its loss?

Shortly before the Big Ten Championship kicked off, I texted some friends who I worked with during my time on the Ohio State beat to tell them I thought Indiana would win that night but Ohio State would win the national championship. Well, we're halfway there and I haven't changed my mind. Ohio State's loss included plenty of self-inflicted errors, but there's nothing like the pain of a loss to force teams to ask tough questions about itself. The odds of having two trips that deep in the red zone result in zero points are not great. Having a field goal kicker miss from inside 30 yards probably won't happen again, either. And, to top it off, it never hurts to be the team that has Jeremiah Smith. 

"We're gonna respond like men," Buckeyes coach Ryan Day said. "You can't just feel sorry for yourself or point fingers. You have to get the issues fixed. ... Defense, there was a lot of good football there ... (but) there were opportunities to win in all three phases."

NDSU SUFFERS MASSIVE UPSET

In one of the weirdest games of the year, FCS power North Dakota State suffered a shocking upset in a 29-28 playoff loss to Illinois State in the round of 16. NDSU entered the game as the undefeated No. 1 seed and a -300 favorite to win the national championship. They also boasted an all-time record of 38-1 in FCS playoff games in the Fargodome, and they had beaten Illinois State handily on the road in the regular season. 

All of that came crashing down on Saturday in a shocking way. Illinois State pulled off the upset despite throwing five interceptions, allowing a punt return touchdown, throwing a pick six, and losing the turnover battle 5-2. That is pretty much incomprehensible to beat anyone playing that way, let alone the undefeated defending champs. However, NDSU apparently forgot how to move the ball altogether. The Bison finished with only six first downs and were outgained 422-179. Their starting quarterback completed 4 of 12 passes and the backup completed 2 of 7 passes. On top of that, 78 of those 179 yards came on one play a couple minutes into the game -- a touchdown pass to Trey Lance's little brother. 

All things considered, it was a perfect representation of our dumb, beautiful sport. 

PLAY OF THE WEEK

Leading 13-10 but facing a third and 6 with 2:40 left, Indiana needed a first down to avoid a situation where Ohio State would get the ball back with two and a half minutes left needing only a field goal. The Hoosiers did that and then some. Quarterback Fernando Mendoza found Charlie Becker for a 33-yard gain, allowing the Hoosiers to run the clock down to 18 seconds before the Buckeyes got the ball back.

IDIOT OF THE WEEK

Any adult at Notre Dame who went along with the decision to sit out the bowl game. So childish. I stand by that for any team, but at least Iowa State and Kansas State did so while undergoing coaching changes and knowing that they were going to eat a pretty severe fine for doing so. (The Big 12 fined each school $500,000.00.) 

Notre Dame's rash decision deprived the players of another few weeks of practice and ended the careers of any seniors who wouldn't have opted out. We only get so many games a year in this dumb, beautiful sport and it's one less chance for their fans to watch this team. (That part doesn't actually seem to bother Notre Dame fans, who have fully bought into and endorsed this mess, but as someone actually capable of thinking clearly it felt worth noting.) 

REF JAIL INMATE OF THE WEEK

Alabama's only touchdown of the SEC Championship Game came on a play where one of the referees could not have set a better screen if he tried. But the real crime came a few plays earlier. Alabama had third-and-6 at the Georgia 38 and threw an incomplete pass. But out came a very questionable flag for pass interference, giving the Tide 15 yards and a fresh set of downs. A couple plays later, the touchdown came and Alabama avoided a very awkward conversation about being shut out in the conference title game. 

RANDOM BOWL MATCHUPS THAT CAUGHT MY EYE

LA Bowl
Boise State vs. Washington - The Chris Petersen Bowl!

Pinstripe Bowl
Clemson vs. Penn State -- Two preseason top 5 teams meet in Yankee Stadium instead of in a CFP semifinal

Citrus Bowl
Michigan vs. Texas - Arch Manning vs. Bryce Underwood in a battle of QBs whose reputations haven't matched results

ReliaQuest Bowl
Iowa vs. Vanderbilt - Diego Pavia against Phil Parker's defense 

Hawaii Bowl
Hawaii vs. California - Nothing other than gut feeling that this will be a fun game to watch

Music City Bowl
Tennessee vs. Illinois - That's a lot of orange 

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