We don't need to turn Notre Dame into a MORAL PANIC

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Folks, I’m sorry if you’re somehow just hearing about this from me, but I can confirm the news: The College Football Playoff selection committee put out a bracket. This bracket has made some people very angry. None as angry as the folks at Notre Dame, who decided to not play in a bowl game at all, even though the team won 10 games in a row and would be able to participate in a high-quality matchup.

Lots of people have lots of opinions about all of this. I do too, but they don’t easily fit in a tweet or a sports talk radio soundbite.

Let me start with this: I like bowl games. I like watching them on TV. I like reading about them. Hell, in case anybody forgot, we even sponsor our own bowl game. And it’s actually that experience that has shifted how I think about this particular controversy.

I hope I don’t get in trouble for sharing this, but it’s true: For the past two Extra Points Bowls, one contingency everybody had to plan for was the idea that a team could decline an invitation.

That hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t think it’s especially likely to happen, but the possibility isn’t zero. Teams may be injured at the end of the year, the academic calendar for some institutions might not perfectly line up, and playing an extra game could simply not make sense for a particular team at a particular time.

If a team had declined a bid, we would have been disappointed, but I think I can speak for everybody involved in the game when I say that nobody would have described it as some sort of moral failure. On to the next team.

I don’t want to insinuate that the Extra Points Bowl and a higher-level FBS Bowl game are exactly the same thing, because they’re not. There are some similarities, though: Schools at both levels carefully weigh financial considerations before accepting bids, and the health and culture of current rosters matter, too. “Bowl experiences,” at our level and for the largest Power 4 games, have gotten shorter, as schools look to trim costs and travel obligations.

There are also very significant differences. In D-III, very few athletes are entering that postseason game wondering about transferring or protecting professional draft stock. Few guys in D-III at all are going to attract transfer portal interest from larger D-I schools, and most of those athletes are competing in the playoffs. The calendar concerns at the FBS level, where coaches are juggling job offers, athletes are figuring out their next move and many rosters are in massive flux … those mostly aren’t a thing at the D-III level. To the extent those conversations happen, they happen later in the year.

You also would be unlikely to have a Notre Dame situation, where decision-makers at a program would (credibly!) think they would be able to compete for a national championship for weeks, only to have the rug pulled out from them in a week when they didn’t even play.

The D-III playoff selection process is pretty cut and dry: 40 teams make the field, with 28 of those bids going automatically to conference champions. The 12 at-large bids are selected using the NCAA Power Index, or NPI, a formula that tracks winning percentage, strength of schedule, road wins, etc. Fans, coaches and everybody else can track this metric on a week-to-week basis, so there aren’t major surprises.