College Football Playoff committee facing its biggest decision ever: Notre Dame or Miami?

Let’s do a little thought exercise using everything we have learned through the first 11 years of the College Football Playoff.

Team A is 10-2, didn’t win a conference championship, has played the 29th-toughest schedule in the country, and owns one win over a team on the low-end of the top 25.

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Team B is also 10-2, didn’t win a conference championship, has played the 43rd-toughest schedule in the country, and owns one win over a team ranked in the top 10.

Based on the blind résumé, you’d probably assume Team B would be ranked slightly above Team A. You’d especially be convinced of that if you learned that when they played head-to-head, Team B defeated Team A.

But in this case, you’d be wrong: Team A is Notre Dame and Team B is Miami.

In the latest CFP rankings on Tuesday night, Notre Dame is ranked No. 9, and Miami is ranked No. 13 with no plausible path to leapfrog the Irish.

So the committee is setting itself up for the biggest controversy — and arguably injustice — in the history of the playoff.

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And yes, that includes the Florida State snub two years ago, which was deeply unfortunate but easy enough to explain: Without quarterback Jordan Travis, the Seminoles were a fundamentally different team than what the committee evaluated for the first 10 weeks of the season

It was harsh, and arguably unfair, but it was logically consistent with the mission of the committee at that time to pick the four best teams.

The potential situation with Notre Dame and Miami is completely different — and significantly more fraught for this committee because, at least right now, it looks like there may be room for only one of the two in this year’s CFP.

New CFP chairman and Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek attempted to explain the committee’s rankings on Tuesday night after the Irish were ranked four spots ahead of the Hurricanes, but the rationale has run counter to how the committee has approached ranking the two teams in the first three sets of rankings.

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“If Miami and Notre Dame are in a comparable range, then head-to-head will be a significant data point we will use,” Yurachek said.

The committee has already signaled a preference for Notre Dame — a decision that would truly buck every bit of precedent the committee has built over the first decade of the playoff.

“The committee felt strongly in terms of where we ranked Miami,” Mack Rhoades, the chairman of the selection committee, told reporters two weeks ago when the Hurricanes debuted at No. 18 in the rankings, a full eight spots behind Notre Dame. “Head-to-head really matters when the teams are comparable at the margins. We look at that really, really closely.”

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Rhoades has subsequently stepped down from the committee and taken a leave of absence from his job as Baylor’s athletic director. We’ll see if a change at the top opens the door for the committee to re-evaluate this whole thing and move toward a scenario where they can put both teams in.

But if we get to the end of the season and both are sitting there at 10-2 but only Notre Dame gets in the playoff, Miami would be the first team in CFP history with a legitimate claim that it was robbed.

In a Monday interview with Miami radio station AM 560, head coach Mario Cristobal essentially took the position that if the Hurricanes win their final two games against Virginia Tech and Pittsburgh, everything will work out the right way.

Here’s Miami’s problem, though: Even if the Hurricanes win those two games, there’s not enough meat on the bone to significantly improve their résumé. Nor are they likely to make the ACC championship game given the amount of help they’d need and the mess of tiebreakers they’d have to win.

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So hypothetically, there would be a very direct and natural comparison to make with Notre Dame if both teams are 10-2 having played schedules that are similar in difficulty.

It’s reasonable to believe — with heavy emphasis on the word believe — that Notre Dame is a better team today than Miami. Since losing their first two games by a combined four points (including a 41-40 loss at home to No. 3 Texas A&M), the Irish have handled their business with authority and look like one of the teams that could threaten Ohio State.

Miami has been spottier and less visually impressive from week to week. You would not tout a three-point loss to Louisville or an overtime loss to SMU as evidence of a championship contender, but they are not horrible, disqualifying losses either.

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The question, as always, is what the job of the committee supposed to be? Should the members be breaking down film of a team’s offense and defense and making judgements off what they believe a team is capable of, or are they there to evaluate a body of work?

In practice, it’s always a little bit of both.

But for the committee to take two teams with very comparable résumés and judge Notre Dame definitively better despite a head-to-head result would be unprecedented.

And fundamentally unfair.

I can say that while fully believing if they played again tomorrow on a neutral field, the result would look very different from Miami’s 27-24 win in Week 1.

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That game was a long time ago. Every team evolves through the course of the season, and Notre Dame’s trajectory has undoubtedly looked more promising since that game than the Hurricanes.

But do we know that? When you look at Notre Dame’s schedule, where its best wins are going to be against Southern Cal and Navy, the committee would be significantly overstepping its mandate to simply ignore the result of a game we already watched.

The committee’s explanation will be rooted in procedure. When committee members debate and vote on teams, they do it in groups of three, which means Miami would have to get into the group of teams within two ranking spots of Notre Dame for the head-to-head to even come up.

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That might technically allow them to avoid a direct Miami-Notre Dame comparison, but it’s not going to pass the common sense test if both teams end up 10-2. If anything, it would raise the question of why anyone else would continue to schedule Notre Dame when beating the Irish just doesn’t matter very much to the committee.

This part is worth repeating: Beating Notre Dame is one of the six or seven best wins anyone has had this season. And we’re not talking about Florida State upsetting Alabama and then falling off the map. Miami has continued to be a very good team and deserves the margin for error a victory like that should bring.

Instead, the committee is relying on reputation and a projection of what they believe Notre Dame to be, not what they’ve put on paper.

The committee still has two weeks to course correct. But if a 10-2 Miami gets left out of this playoff while 10-2 Notre Dame glides in with very little to prop up its résumé, it will be the least sensible and defensible decision they’ve ever made.