Notre Dame took its ball and went home

The Big Notre Dame Tantrum is five days old, but it still hasn’t blown over. What in the name of Rudy were they thinking? If school officials and their fans are not embarr***ed, they should be.

After failing to secure one of the 12 spots in the College Football Playoff, they threw a fit and announced that the Fightin’ Irish will not play in a bowl game — in this case, a matchup that would have featured No. 11 Notre Dame and No. 12 BYU.

They’re not the Fightin’ Irish — they’re the Poutin’ Irish.

It was not a good look and the backlash has been swift and universal. No one outside of South Bend is taking their side. Notre Dame was a brat. A spoiled brat. A pampered child who ran crying to his room, slamming the door behind him.

The Irish won’t play ball. Somewhere, the Gipper groaned. Knute Rockne turned in his grave. Rudy Ruettiger pulled his letter jacket over his head.

Win one for the Gipper? How about just play one for the Gipper?

Years from now, marketing cl***es will study this as an example of What Not To Do. It’s a PR nightmare. It was Bud Light stupid. Cracker Barrel stupid. It was met with condemnation everywhere.

Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told ESPN that the program was in utter disbelief and shock after being left out of the playoff on Sunday. He said any rankings ahead of the final rankings are “a farce and total waste of time.”

The real farce is the game of footsies that college football has been playing with Notre Dame since forever. That’s the maddening irony of Notre Dame’s tantrum.

Notre Dame has had it so good for so long that they’ve forgotten themselves. The Irish have received preferential treatment for decades.

Only Alabama comes close to such favoritism, but at least the Crimson Tide has earned its reputation in the contemporary era. Notre Dame’s record in the CFP: 0-3. Last championship: 1988. But college football still thinks Notre Dame is the Notre Dame of long ago. They still think of the Notre Dame of raccoon coats and rumble seats.

The Irish have been treated like the golden child. Like royalty. Nobody has benefitted more from this crazy, stupid system of deciding national champions than Notre Dame during the last 100 years.

To wit: Thanks to a Memorandum of Understanding signed last spring, Notre Dame is guaranteed a playoff spot starting in 2026 if it finishes in the top 12 of the rankings. How is that fair? It’s the way college football has bent over backwards for Notre Dame for decades.

Under the rules of the old Bowl Championships Series, or BCS, the precursor to the current playoff system from 1998-2013, there was a special stipulation that awarded an automatic BCS bowl bid to Notre Dame if it finished in the top eight of the final BCS standings. No other school was granted such a stipulation.

Then on Sunday, Bevacqua had the audacity to say, “We feel like the (2025) playoff was stolen from our student-athletes.”

The Irish have been given every advantage; Bevacqua should just quiet down before the rest of the college football world wakes up to this free ride.

As an independent, Notre Dame never even has to play in a conference championship game, as every other team must. That should be a requirement in the future: No more free postseason p***es to the playoff for Notre Dame. Join a conference and play a real conference schedule and a conference championship game, like everyone else.

This season, the Irish were ranked in the top 10 of each weekly CFP ranking until Sunday, when it fell to No. 11. Miami, which beat Notre Dame 27-24 early in the season, jumped two places, over BYU and Notre Dame, from No. 12 to No. 10.

The top 10 ranked schools were awarded berths in the playoff, while the other two spots were automatically awarded to the top highest-ranked conference champions who were not in the top 10, No. 20 Tulane and No. 24 James Madison.

“Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungering for,” explained Hunter Yurachek, the chairman of the CFP selection committee. “You look at those two teams on paper, and they are almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, the results against common opponents.

“But the one metric we had to fall back on, again, was the head-to-head.”

How can anyone argue with that?

Maybe Notre Dame was most upset about missing the $4 million payday that is paid to the playoff teams. Unlike the other schools, Notre Dame wouldn’t have to share any of it with conference members. On the other hand, Notre Dame turned down a $3 million offer from the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

At the end of the day, nothing happened to Notre Dame that hasn’t happened to dozens of deserving teams over the years who were denied the chance to compete for the national title — unbeaten Utah in 2004 and 2008, for instance — but nobody has ever pouted like Notre Dame.