NCAA staff falsified last week’s College Football Playoff bracket to include a Miami (Fla.) team that did not qualify

When last week’s College Football Playoff (CFP) rankings came out, Nov. 25, 2025, NCAA staff, posting at ncaa.com, falsified their provisional College Football Playoff (CFP) bracket to include a Miami (Fla.) team that actually did not even qualify for the Playoff.

Even though that bracket was tentative and unofficial, it still was held out as “based on the current committee rankings,” to reflect what would happen if the bracket were formed that day.

They had Miami (Fla.) in the bracket as a #11 seed, playing #6 seed Oregon in the first round. (clicking on link opens graphic)

The problem was, Miami (Fla.) was simply not ranked high enough to qualify for an at-large bid. And, tied for 4th in the ACC, they were not in a position to even go to their conference title game.

Beneath the bracket, NCAA staff state falsely, “12. Miami (Fla.): 9-2 (fourth highest-ranked conference champion).“

Even assuming that an ACC conference title game winner might qualify for an automatic bid, if ranked high enough, Miami (Fla.) was tied for 4th in the ACC at the time, and did not even qualify to play in the ACC title game.

Indeed, even after the final games were played the following weekend, and the ACC conference title game was actually set, Miami (Fla.) still was not included. Miami (Fla.) is now tied with four other teams beaten out by both Virginia and Duke. Duke is an unranked team with five losses.

One can only speculate as to the reasons for the NCAA staff’s inaccurate portrayal.

Perhaps somebody simply might shrug off the mistakes and say, well, they though they should “save a spot” for the ACC, and that Miami (Fla.) was the highest ranked member in the underperforming ACC.

Except the ACC is not entitled to an automatic bid, in and of itself.

And all this came against a backdrop in which the carnival barkers of college football, apparently including some working in ACC PR, are already trying to concoct an “Alice in Wonderland” false “debate” between Miami (Fla.) and ‘Notre Dame.’

The gist seems to be whether a Miami team that lost to unranked opponents in October and December should still be ranked ahead of a ‘Notre Dame’ team they beat narrowly, at home, back in August.

The Irish, for their part, are now playing like the best team in college football, while riding a 10-game winning streak since mid-September.

By placing Miami (Fla.) in the bracket, NCAA staff risked lulling, if not “grooming,” the public into casual acceptance of of Miami (Fla.) being “part of the deal” even though they simply do not qualify.

Perhaps someone hopes it might “go over” more easily if, later, the increasingly relentless public relations blitz pays off, and the rankings are manipulated to inflate Miami (Fla.)’s standing.

Even though Miami was ranked #12 in the Nov. 25 CFP rankings, at least two spots in the 12-team CFP would have to be given to teams that are ranked lower than 12th,  perhaps even to a team not even ranked at all.

Under the official CFP Selection Committee Protocol as written, no automatic bids go to so-called “Power Conference” champions from the B1G/Big Ten, SEC, Big 12 and ACC.

Instead, among the pool of all conference champions, automatic bids go to the five conference champions, from any conference, with the highest rankings among that subset.

Indeed, this year, the ACC conference champion risks being shut out, if the CFP rankings were as honest as the AP and Coaches Poll, which now have a 11-1 Sun Belt leader James Madison at #19, just three spots behind ACC conference title contender Virginia.

James Madison’s only loss was a 14-point loss, in early September, to the ACC’s Louisville, a team drifting in and out of the rankings.  Ironically, Louisville was one of two unranked teams to beat Miami (Fla.), which they did later in the season, in mid-October.

The CFP rankings, crafted by a much smaller, less credentialed pool of voters than the AP or Coaches Poll, ignore James Madison entirely, in favor of cycling team(s)-of-the-moment from the American Athletic Conference closer to the bottom of the top-25.

But if James Madison were included, and finished 12-1 as Sun Belt champion, while the rankings still retain a conference winner from the American, the ACC could hypothetically be shut out, especially if Duke wins the ACC conference title game.

Duke currently is unranked, struggling to stay above .500, with five losses.  Virginia is only favored over Duke by 3.5 points, after the line started out at 2.5.

So a “Duke Doomsday” for the ACC is a very real possibility, if the CFP rankings were to stop essentially boycotting the Sun Belt’s James Madison.

One might have assumed that the four Power Conference champions would be included, but, as indicated, that is not guaranteed.

Perhaps in the name of “fairness,” and to avoid the seismic repercussions if a Power Conference were left out, the strategy seems to be, to assume the Power Conference champions get their four spots, and to “anoint” one minor conference for the fifth bid, by cycling several teams through the rankings.

Last year, everybody lucked out, when Boise State played a close game with Oregon, then took care of business against a decent Mountain West, in which UNLV had a solid year.

This year, the CFP committee seemed to “anoint” the American Athletic Conference to get the fifth spot, perhaps because of greater “cross-pollination” with Power Conferences.

The situation is complicated, of course, by the fact that the vast national expansion and realignments of the “conferences” has resulted in sometimes-coast-to-coast conglomerations that are not really conferences any more, yet would still like to hang onto the “branding” and residual stature of the conferences.

In the past, one fundamental aspect of a conference was that most of the teams would play each other, with just a few exceptions.  Conference play became a kind of “round robin,” so that the final results in the conference standings had some rational basis for indicating who the best team was.

With today’s ungainly, overly large megaconferences, so many teams do not play each other that the standings themselves become unwieldy, with clusters of teams with identical records. Then the tie-breakers can become even worse.

Paradoxically, but quite predictably, instead of final standings being decided by thoroughly mixed conference play, they end up being decided by how a gaggle of teams fared against a quite small set of common opponents that are not representative of the conference.