Notre Dame stayed at #12 in the rankings this week with BYU jumping the Irish despite a close, last-second win at home over a team now under .500. Part of the reason for their lack of movement could be because one AP voter admitted to submitting their rankings incorrectly this week, completely omitting the Irish all together.
Kate Rogerson of ABC11 in Raleigh is the only AP voter in the country not to have Notre Dame in their top 25 this week. It was not some sort of statement or attempt to gain notoriety either. Instead, the sports reporter from North Carolina claims that she simply forgot to rank Notre Dame this week and that they Irish should have been 13th in her poll.
Mistakes happen, but it is a pretty rough look to admit to completely forgetting a team and not ranking them altogether. At the same time, I guess there is a reason that college football doesn’t let the AP have any say in who is in the playoffs or what the actual rankings that matter are.
If we do the math on how many points Notre Dame would have gotten at #13, they’d still be just slightly behind BYU who, again, somehow impressed voters more this week than they have in previous weeks by almost losing at home.
This is just another reminder that while the current version of the College Football Playoff committee is far from perfect, it’s much better than the alternative. Mistakes aside, AP voters historically let their own bias very much influence their rankings. For instance, Brian Fonseca of NJ Advance Media has Notre Dame ranked #20 in the country while simultaneously ranking Texas A&M #12 overall. Apparently, Brian missed Notre Dame’s 10-point win in the supposedly “impossible” environment of Kyle Field.
The Irish, of course, can’t say all that much since they have both one of the most impressive wins of the season (Texas A&M) and one of the worst losses (Northern Illinois) on their resume at the same time. It will be interesting to see if the Irish get any reward for a win this weekend if they can knock off a Navy team that comes into the yearly contest ranked for the first time since 2019 and just the second time at all since 1979. Fonseca, for instance, has Navy #21 and Notre Dame #20. Surely, a win against the Midshipmen will be rewarded – again, that is very much an assumption at this point – won’t it?
Don’t hold your breath on any outcome next week positively impacting Notre Dame’s resume. Voters historically ding the Irish for even playing Navy even if the Irish win impressively over a team they themselves rank high.
All of that, of course, hinges on the voters actually remembering to submit their weekly rankings accurately, though. And we learned this week that that isn’t a given.
Luckily, we are only two weeks away from the first real rankings, the College Football Playoff rankings, of the year. They will be released on Tuesday, November 5. Until then we can at least use the AP rankings to amuse ourselves.
The forces of the FBS, SEC, BIG TEN and their acolytes don’t particularly like a school like Notre Dame. Notre Dame still has a conscience in wanting the STUDENT in student athlete.
It’s an uphill battle for the forces of good in college football.