When Holiday Bowl executive director Mark Neville woke up Sunday morning, he assumed he would be announcing his bowl’s Clemson-USC matchup later that day. Gator Bowl counterpart Greg McGarity was anticipating North Carolina versus Tennessee in his game. The Sun Bowl’s Bernie Olivas had his eyes on Miami-Oregon State, but there were several other teams he figured were possible on the ACC side — none of which were Notre Dame.
Then the College Football Playoff selection show came on. They, along with many other bowl directors, watched with varying degrees of shock when 13-0 Florida State was not included among the top four teams.
It set off a chaotic chain of events during several hours Sunday that affected more than 20 teams’ bowl destinations and ended with a top-20 Notre Dame team headed for El Paso.
“It was crazy, and it all started with the unfortunate decision not to put Florida State in the top four,” Neville said.
“It was something nobody could really fathom,” McGarity said. “I don’t think anyone really planned for it.”
Selection Sunday is often a bit of a fire drill for the bowls, but two 11th-hour wrinkles made this year’s lineup particularly fluid — and in one conference’s case, controversial.
For weeks, it was assumed that the loser of the Ohio State-Michigan game would play in the Orange Bowl as the highest-ranked available team from the Big Ten or SEC. But when Alabama upset Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, it meant the Dawgs, not the Buckeyes, landed in Miami. That in turn triggered an unusual clause in the leagues’ contracts that turned the ReliaQuest (formerly Outback) Bowl from an ACC bowl to a Big Ten bowl. The Irish, who can play in any ACC bowl in their agreement with the conference, had been the Tampa game’s presumed pick, but that was no longer an option.
Marcus Freeman’s Notre Dame team will face Oregon State in the Sun Bowl. (Ken Ruinard / USA Today)
It was widely assumed that Louisville would be on the other side of the Orange Bowl, win or lose in the ACC title game. Either the Cardinals would win and, as the ACC’s champion, be contractually placed there, or FSU would win and move into the Playoff, with Louisville replacing it in Miami.
But with no ACC team in the Playoff, that conference landed only one New Year’s Six team, turning Louisville into a bowl free agent. And with Louisville now out, No. 11 Ole Miss unexpectedly landed the SEC a fourth New Year’s Six berth, sending a ripple through that conference’s lineup that left the SEC-affiliated Duke’s Mayo Bowl with no eligible team. Through some 11th-hour bartering, the Charlotte game somehow landed a Big 12 team, 8-4 West Virginia.
“Going into the weekend, you try to plan out the various scenarios, you play the various what ifs out,” said Danny Morrison, executive director of the Charlotte Sports Foundation. “But we always go in saying, ‘Understand, we’re likely going to play whack-a-mole.’”
But the dominoes did not fall as smoothly in the ACC.
The Gator Bowl, Holiday Bowl and Pop-Tarts (formerly Cheez-It) Bowl in Orlando, which comprise the league’s “premium” tier, can in theory select any remaining team within one win of each other, as long as they avoid repeat visits, regular-season rematches, etc. Heading into the weekend, that pool was expected to consist of 9-3 NC State, 8-4 Clemson and 8-4 North Carolina. Now, it appeared the bowls could pick from 10-3 Louisville and 9-3 Notre Dame as well.
But when the bowls got on their scheduled 2:45 p.m. ET call with ACC senior associate commissioner for football Michael Strickland and other league executives, they learned it would not be that simple. For one thing, conference rules and tiebreakers stipulated that Louisville and NC State, the latter by virtue of its head-to-head wins over Clemson and North Carolina, had to be two of the three teams selected.
As for Notre Dame, an official with one of the involved bowls said his bowl was told “point blank” by the conference that the Irish were “not available” to its pool. The source was not pleased at “being told who the teams were” and believed the process ran contrary to the contracts.
An ACC official said Notre Dame was “eligible for selection, but under the selection guidelines, their selection by one of those bowls was not guaranteed.”
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While other bowl announcements began trickling out across social media as early as mid-afternoon, the ACC’s remained notably missing. That’s because the group’s normally brief selection call lasted nearly 90 minutes. NC State had been to San Diego in 2021, too recently to return. The same applied with Clemson in Orlando. And the SEC, which largely dictates which of its teams go where, already had placed Kentucky in the Gator Bowl, ruling out Louisville. Thus, the Pop-Tarts got the Wolfpack (to face Kansas State), the Gator got Clemson and the Cardinals landed in San Diego against USC.
“(FSU’s snub) was unfortunate for college football,” Neville said, “but for us, it worked out that we got the No. 15 team in the country coming out here.”
The prolonged process delayed selections for the conference’s next tier of bowls — the Duke’s Mayo, Pinstripe and Sun bowls. Olivas, the longtime director of El Paso’s 88-year-old bowl game, nervously shuttled back and forth between the bowl’s “war room” and a party the bowl was hosting for 300 guests.
Finally, he got a text that it was time to log onto a Zoom call, at which point Strickland informed the bowl of the remaining teams it could choose from. They included UNC, Miami … and Notre Dame.
“We were shocked,” said Olivas, who had locked in Oregon State on the Pac-12 side. “In our weekly meetings with our football committee and our board of directors, Notre Dame never came up. We had no idea what happened above us.”
Unsurprisingly, all three bowls submitted the Irish as their top choice. Per the ACC official, the league then followed its prescribed process, leading to … its attorney writing each bowl’s name on a piece of paper and drawing it out of a hat.
“He twirled them around, twirled them around, and Michael Strickland read the name — Sun Bowl,” Olivas said.
Olivas then went to announce it at the party. Only one problem: No one had thought to include Notre Dame, which last played at the bowl in 2010, among the row of helmets displayed on the table in front of him. Standing next to Tony the Tiger on one side and the Sun Court “Lady in Waiting” on the other, Olivas raised his arms like an Olympian who just won the gold, and the crowd erupted.
The game sold out within 24 hours.
After the Pinstripe Bowl landed Miami and North Carolina got the home-state Mayo Bowl, most of the remaining dominoes fell to ESPN Events, which owns and operates 17 bowls and absorbs some of the conferences’ surplus teams. That’s how Syracuse landed seemingly randomly in the Boca Raton Bowl, perhaps for all the Central New York retirees there. At one point, it was reported that Duke would play UCF in the Gasparilla Bowl before someone noticed the teams had just faced each other in last season’s Military Bowl. Georgia Tech swapped places with the Blue Devils.
The 41st and final bowl announcement of the day — Duke versus Troy in the Birmingham Bowl — came shortly before 7 p.m. ET, nearly seven hours after the FSU bombshell that ricocheted from the ESPN set in Bristol, Conn., to the Bronx, to Orlando, to El Paso, to San Diego and many points in between.
“We’ve been doing this since 2019,” Morrison said. “We’ve had something pop up unexpectedly every year, but I would say this one had a lot more pop-ups.”
— The Athletic’s Scott Dochterman contributed to this report.
(Top photo of Mike Norvell: James Gilbert / Getty Images)
2023-12-05 23:55:20
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