Matt Fortuna

How’s everyone doing tonight?

ABC/ESPN commentary teams for the College Football Playoff:

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Notre Dame … well, you know

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Notre Dame opts out of a bowl game

Hunter Yurachek on the Notre Dame-Miami rewatch:

Jen Lada:

Notre Dame players were leaving the facility "hanging their head, walking slowly, some of them having phone conversations, but all of them sort of in shock and disbelief."

ESPN's Jen Lada spoke with Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua.

Asked him about a bowl appearance and he tells her they haven't even thought of that.

Notre Dame got snubbed from the Playoff, but this shouldn't dictate much about the program's direction The Irish were a victim of process on Sunday. It stings. But they still might have it better than every school in the country moving forward.

Notre Dame got snubbed.

It shouldn't change a thing about how the Irish operate moving forward.

COLUMN ⬇️
www.insidezonemf.com/p/notre-dame...

Rece Davis: "So you're telling me that head-to-head never really came up till they were ranked side by side? That seems to be different from the process of ordering and ranking the teams that you guys go through."

Hunter Yurachek says BYU losing opened the door for Miami to jump them.

"Then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungry for."

"The one metric that we had to fall back on was the head-to-head."

Says he charged the committee to go back and watch Notre Dame-Miami game again.

"I just think there was one team left out that I just don't think should have been left out some kind of way, but there was no way around it."

— Nick Saban

Good on Kirk Herbstreit for calling this ESPN production (weekly rankings shows) a mistake and misleading. You rarely see that kind of candor from inside the house.

Here it is, the 2025-26 College Football Playoff bracket:

Oh my goodness. Miami makes it over Notre Dame to make the College Football Playoff.

The Big Ten has the top-two seeds in the field.

Will we get a rematch in Miami next month?

The Big 12 has issued a $500,000 fine to both Iowa State and Kansas State for opting out of bowl games.

"While the Conference acknowledges the difficult timing around coaching changes, the Big 12 is responsible for fulfilling its contractual obligations to its bowl partners."

I keep coming back to this from last night

I can’t stress enough how big the hole was for Bo Jackson (second photo) to score.

Hard to believe that Indiana stopped Ohio State inside the 10 on back-to-back drives.

Fortuna Files: The Big Ten is winning on the field. Its Playoff proposals? Not so much. Conference title games elsewhere show the danger of automatic bids.

Seeing the impact of the ACC and SEC title games this weekend is a nice reminder of why the Big Ten’s auto-bids proposal was so bad.

COLUMN ⬇️

www.insidezonemf.com/p/fortuna-fi...

Indiana — yes, Indiana — is your Big Ten champion The Hoosiers shock Ohio State and shock the world, beating the Buckeyes at their own game and flipping college football on its head.

The Indiana Hoosiers are your Big Ten champions.

Read all about it ⬇️

www.insidezonemf.com/p/indiana-ye...

Fortuna Files: The Big Ten is winning on the field. Its Playoff proposals? Not so much. Conference title games elsewhere show the danger of automatic bids.

Seeing the impact of the ACC and SEC title games this weekend is a nice reminder of why the Big Ten’s auto-bids proposal was so bad.

COLUMN ⬇️

www.insidezonemf.com/p/fortuna-fi...

Fernando Mendoza's Heisman speech is gonna be epic, isn't it?

Indiana — yes, Indiana — is your Big Ten champion The Hoosiers shock Ohio State and shock the world, beating the Buckeyes at their own game and flipping college football on its head.

The Indiana Hoosiers are your Big Ten champions.

Read all about it ⬇️

www.insidezonemf.com/p/indiana-ye...

Curt Cignetti, what do you think now?

Cig: "I think we're a year late."

Fernando Mendoza just won the Heisman with that third-down throw.

And Indiana just won the Big Ten and the No. 1 seed.

Un. Friggin. Believable.

Ohio State ran 27 total plays on its last 2 drives only to get stopped twice on 3rd-and-1, once on 4th-and-1, and then miss a 27-yard FG.

Ohio State opts for a 27-yard FG down 3 points with 2:48 left ... and misses

Pat McAfee (and Tyrese Haliburton) in the house

If Indiana goes on to win, Ohio State fans will freeze-frame these two stops on that last drive as the reason why.

A literal game of inches.

The Big Ten title game stakes in three pictures, via FOX:

That's the first TD that Ohio State's first-team defense has given up since the Penn State game.

That was on Nov. 1.