Notre Dame’s independence makes more sense than ever in the 12-team Playoff era

Penn State’s James Franklin sat at the podium next to Marcus Freeman, the coach he’d face the next day in the national semifinals. And Franklin decided he wanted to make a point — at Freeman’s expense.

“This is no knock at Coach Freeman or Notre Dame, but I think everybody should be in a conference,” Franklin said. “I think everybody should play in a conference championship game or no one should play in a conference championship game.”

Notre Dame is famously one of the last remaining independents in the Football Bowl Subdivision. There’s no other school that Franklin could have been referring to, certainly not one that would regularly be in the mix for College Football Playoff contention.

And he wasn’t alone in fixating on it, as plenty of pundits and fans of other teams have done the same over the past month as the Fighting Irish have advanced round after round all the way to the national championship game in the first edition of the 12-team CFP. Even after a September loss to Northern Illinois, the worst loss by far of any CFP contender this season, there was never a real question whether an 11-1 Notre Dame team would make the 12-team field. The Irish were even ranked high enough to host a first-round game; teams seeded fifth through eighth earn that honor.

“We need to know there’s access to the national championship,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told NBC Sports this week. “Thankfully, that’s always been the case for Notre Dame over the course of our long football history. … And when we are talking about the CFP, we keep going back to those three key tenants of it, which for me are: Access, governance, and then obviously the revenue possibilities that come with making the CFP.”

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/notre-dames-independence-makes-more-140000291.html

Author : NBC Sports

Publish date : 2025-01-17 14:00:00

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