Notre Dame Football: Are Irish or Texas A&M more deserving?

With Notre Dame looking bad and Texas A&M looking good, does Notre Dame deserve to be in the CFP? 

In the movie Hoosiers, Gene Hackman huddled the Hickory Sycamores together as they were being dominated in the state finals and said, “Maybe everyone was right, we don’t deserve to be here.”  The team from rural Indiana put the ball in Jimmy Chitwood’s hands and, well, watch the movie. Notre Dame football head coach Brian Kelly either had no such conversation or had no such luck with the Fighting Irish last night.

The Clemson Tigers outclassed and dominated Notre Dame 34-10 in a game reminiscent of their 2018 National Semifinal contest. On the eve of selection Sunday, the Tigers, not the Irish, proclaimed on the field that they deserve to be in the Playoff. What’s worse for Notre Dame football is down in Knoxville, the Texas A&M Aggies put a beatdown on the Tennessee Volunteers by a similar score, 34-13.

Now the Playoff committee has the task of figuring out the four teams that should make the National Semifinal. Notre Dame has a simple advantage; it was the No. 2 seed coming into the weekend and need to be bumped out of the playoff. This season there are holes in everyone’s resume except Alabama –and the Tide aren’t exactly perfect.

The selection process is a combination of finding the best teams and the most deserving. This season, the only team that could claim to be the best would be Alabama. Ohio State, Notre Dame, Texas A&M and even Cincinnati all have resumes that could lay claim to being most deserving.

Do the Irish “deserve” to get in? That’s up to the committee.