Notre Dame’s exclusion from the College Football Playoff marked the end of the season for coach Marcus Freeman’s team, but the beginning of a war of words.
On Monday, fewer than 24 hours after the Fighting Irish didn’t see their name revealed on the 12-team playoff bracket, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua went on “The Dan Patrick Show” to lash out at the ACC, saying the league that houses most of the school’s non-football sports had “done permanent damage to the relationship” between the two parties after the conference publicly lobbied for Miami to make the playoff field over the Fighting Irish.
Bevacqua’s comments received widespread criticism — including from one of his fellow power brokers in the world of college athletics.
During a sit-down interview at Sports Business Journal’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Las Vegas, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark slammed Bevacqua’s criticism of the ACC, describing the administrator’s words as “egregious.”
“I don’t like how Notre Dame’s reacted to it,” Yormark said. “I think Pete’s behavior has been egregious. It’s been egregious going after (ACC commissioner) Jim Phillips when they saved Notre Dame during COVID.”
While Notre Dame is an independent in football, 24 of the university’s athletic programs are members of the ACC. Additionally, the school has had a football scheduling agreement with the ACC since 2014, one in which the Fighting Irish have to play an average of five ACC programs a year over the life of the deal. In 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACC allowed Notre Dame to play 10 ACC teams on its 11-game schedule that season and be eligible for the league’s championship game. On the back of that ACC-heavy schedule, the Fighting Irish made the ACC championship game, where it lost to Clemson, and was selected for the then-four-team College Football Playoff.
As the debate waged last week over which combination of Notre Dame, Miami and Alabama should earn the final two at-large spots in the playoff, the ACC campaigned for Miami, the only one of the trio that is a football member of the conference.
On Nov. 10, the league’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a graphic comparing the respective resumes of the Hurricanes and Fighting Irish while highlighting Miami’s head-to-head victory against Notre Dame and its higher number of wins against top-25 opponents. The ACC Network also aired the Hurricanes’ 27-24 Week 1 victory over the Fighting Irish more than a dozen times last week in the days leading up to the final playoff bracket reveal. Miami ultimately earned the final at-large spot after being behind Notre Dame for each of the previous weekly ranking unveilings.
Those actions irked Bevacqua, who has voiced his displeasure with the conference of which his school’s football program isn’t a member.
‘I understand they have to stand up for their teams in football,’ Bevacqua said on Tuesday, Dec. 9. ‘We just think there’s other ways to do it, and it has created damage. I’m not going to shy away from that, and that’s just not me speaking. People a lot more important at this university than me feel the same way.”
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips had responded to Bevacqua’s comments on Monday in a statement in which he said that “when it comes to football, we have a responsibility to support and advocate for all 17 of our football-playing member institutions, and I stand behind our conference efforts to do just that leading up to the College Football Playoff Committee selections on Sunday.”
Though Notre Dame’s coaches and players may have understandably felt blindsided by the playoff selection committee’s final ranking, Yormark believes the clues for Miami leapfrogging the Fighting Irish were apparent all along. And, to him, that makes Bevacqua’s behavior even more unacceptable.
“(Playoff selection committee chairman) Hunter (Yurachek) was very transparent about it, the chair, that as Notre Dame and Miami got closer together, head-to-head would be a factor,” Yormark said. “BYU lost. They became closer and head-to-head made a difference in that decision. I think he’s totally out of bounds in his approach and if he was in the room, I’d tell him the same thing.”