Miami (Fla.) head coach Mario Cristobal is confident that the Hurricanes’ head-to-head record against Notre Dame will prove impactful when it comes to the final College Football Playoff rankings.
“I think it will (matter),” Cristobal said Thursday, while appearing on FOX Sports’ “Bear Bets.” “I think it will continue to be seen because it’s reality. We’re both 10-2, we had the opportunity to play each other, and we won the game.”
In fact, Cristobal is fully confident that the CFP committee will see his reasoning and understand it. Up to this point, however, it hasn’t. In the committee’s fifth edition of the CFP rankings, No. 12 Miami sits two spots behind No. 10 Notre Dame despite beating the then-No. 6 Fighting Irish in Week 1 when the Hurricanes were ranked 10th.
In that game, the Hurricanes won the battle in the trenches on both sides of the ball, Cristobal said. They held Notre Dame superstar running back Jeremiyah Love to just 33 yards on the ground.
Cristobal went on to say that he feels that performance isn’t adequately factoring into Miami’s CFP standing.
The Hurricanes and the Fighting Irish share the same 4-0 record against their four common opponents — NC State, Syracuse, Pitt and Stanford. Apart from Syracuse, Miami had a greater margin of victory against all those opponents.
Miami can’t improve its standing on the field, as it isn’t playing in Saturday’s ACC Championship Game. Instead, Cristobal hopes to improve the team’s standing off the field by standing up for the Canes and pitching that they should be ranked ahead of Notre Dame because they own the head-to-head victory.
“I’m honored to be on your show, but honestly, the way that I was raised — the ways that we’ve all been raised in football with the integrity of the game — I wouldn’t even bother coming on your show had we both been 10-2, and we were on the losing side of the head-to-head.”
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