The Miami Hurricanes heard Notre Dame's whining about being left out of the College Football Playoff and took things personally. Two rounds into the bracket and the third place squad in the ACC is a semifinalist in the national title chase.
Wednesday's Cotton Bowl upset over the defending national champion Ohio State Buckeyes proved the 12-team CFP is just as unpredictable as its basketball counterpart in March. Including last year's debut, five straight quarterfinal matchups have seen the non-first-round bye team advance.
That's going to prompt a new topic of discussion when the inevitable conversation about the tournament's format rears its head this offseason. That discussion will certainly center around which conferences should be better positioned for automatic bids, especially considering the independent Notre Dame is guaranteed a bid if it ranks in the top 12 or 13 (in a 14-team format) starting next season.
Miami's Cotton Bowl victory just saved the ACC from potentially detrimental CFP conversation
Entering the 2025-26 CFP, discourse swirled around whether the ACC was perhaps losing its Power Conference luster. Its highest-ranked team was not participating in the conference championship game due to convoluted tiebreakers and losing to a pair of unranked foes late in the year. The one ranked squad that was participating lost to a five-loss would-be bid stealer, opening the door for the committee to experiment with two Group of Five auto-bids.
Ultimately, the committee gambled on Miami's inclusion as one last opportunity for the ACC to prove it should be part of the conversation that may eventually award each Power Conference an auto-bid moving forward. The Hurricanes have taken advantage of that opportunity and the committee's gamble is paying off big time.
"People don't realize how good the teams in the ACC are, and I hope they're realizing that now," head coach Mario Cristobal told reporters in his post-game press conference.
"This game was just about as much as getting back up as it was hitting the opponent, and again resilience paid off."
— ACC Network (@accnetwork) January 1, 2026
Mario Cristobal after the @CanesFootball 24-14 win over Ohio State 🙌 pic.twitter.com/2jDaz8hHum
Not only have they just advanced from bubble team to semifinalists, the Canes eliminated teams that contended for SEC and Big Ten titles respectively throughout the vast majority of the year. Those are the two leagues trying to convince the powers that be to grant eight-auto bids to them (four each).
Wednesday's upset over Ohio State should give everyone pause to reflect that his is a college sport still. The golden rule still applies. Any team can beat any other team on any given day. Playoff expansion is inevitable but Miami has proven the CFP cannot rubber stamp a Big Ten-SEC monopoly on the bracket.