Notre Dame Fighting Irish supporters will never get over their team getting snubbed in the 2025/2026 CFP field to make room for an undeserving Alabama Crimson Tide team that had three losses, including a 28-7 SEC Championship Game loss to the Georgia Bulldogs the night before the field was decided. Every time I get the chance to speak to someone from the Notre Dame orbit, I ask for their thoughts on the Fighting Irish's infamous snub from the field. Typically, there's a clear consensus that Alabama had no business edging Notre Dame for a spot, with no one buying into the popular narrative from major networks that Group of 5 schools Tulane Green Wave and James Madison Dukes shouldn't have made it. Ahead of NBC's 2026 American Century Championship, which takes place July 8-12 at the Edgewood Tahoe Resort, I got to speak to NBC Sports President of Acquisitions and Partnerships Jon Miller. He was very much in that boat.
Miller, who helped orchestrate NBC becoming the broadcast partner for Notre Dame football in 1990, the same year he helped launch the American Century Championship, was complimentary about the university as a business partner. He was also complimentary of how Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua handled the response to the snub, pulling his program out of consideration for any non-CFP bowl games and later lobbying for a rule that'd place the Irish in future CFP fields if they finish the regular season in the top 12. That rule was passed, ensuring fairness moving forward, since ND doesn't play a conference championship game as a CFB independent.
However, Miller was anything but complimentary about how the CFP selection committee, chaired by Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek, treated the Fighting Irish last December. He called the snub a "disservice to college football."
Like others with a stake in the Fighting Irish, Miller believes ESPN pulled strings to help out its SEC property.
"I applaud Pete Bevacqua, the athletic director at Notre Dame. I think he took a very bold, aggressive stance, standing up for the university, which he should do in that role. He had every right to call out the committee, who I think fumbled terribly by not putting Notre Dame in," Miller told me.
"I certainly didn't have any problem with Miami getting in. I saw Notre Dame play Miami. That game was very close. Notre Dame lost at the end, but Miami certainly deserved to be there, as did Notre Dame. I think you had a selection committee filled with guys who were predisposed to favor SEC schools, and I don't think they wanted to suffer the outrage that would come from their SEC friends and whatnot if they didn't give Alabama the nod...
"That's unfortunate, because I think they did college football a disservice. So hopefully, that mistake will be rectified going forward, and you won't see that kind of huge misstep by the committee again."
Several Notre Dame legends also believe the fix was in for Alabama because of ESPN
In speaking to former Fighting Irish stars Joe Theismann and Jerome Bettis, it's clear that ESPN rubbed basically everyone in the Notre Dame orbit the wrong way by shoehorning the Crimson Tide into the 2025/2026 CFP field.
Theismann saw what ESPN was doing in the lead-up to the CFP field's selection show as an on-air analyst himself.
“They were pushing for it. I mean, you could tell through the broadcast that they were pushing for them to be there. That's the thing about broadcasting, and I spent 23 years doing it, is that you can sense, in listening to different announcers, you can sense the direction that they want things to go. It's almost like they're trying to will certain situations out there," Theismann told me last month.
Bettis, meanwhile, believes ESPN wasn't going to run the risk of snubbing Alabama for two years in a row. Despite going 9-3 in 2024, many for some reason felt the Crimson Tide were snubbed for the 2024/2025 field.
"I think the voters knew…there was some movement that they were trying to create to make sure Alabama got in because it wasn't going to be a good outing in the SEC championship (against Georgia). They were trying to support the SEC in that. They wanted both teams to get in…because the year before, Alabama got snubbed, so they didn't want it to happen a second year. They wanted to protect the SEC and move Alabama up before the SEC championship game," Bettis told me.
It'll be a long time before those supporting the Irish ever forgive ESPN for ruining the sanctity of the CFP last year by choosing Alabama over Notre Dame. While ball don't lie, and the Tide got theirs against the eventual CFP champion Indiana Hoosiers in a 38-3 Rose Bowl rout, the Irish missed out on a minimum payment of $4 million, but up to $20 million had they made the title game again, for ESPN's intentional mistake.
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