CFP committee decisions put home-and-home series between Texas and Notre Dame in jeopardy

The 12 members of the College Football Playoff committee certainly didn’t seem to pay much attention to the media blitz by Texas Longhorns head coach Steve Sarkisian this week as he made the public case for his team to make the 12-team field this after beating the then-No. 3 Texas A&M Aggies.

So it’s questionable whether they will pay any more attention to the threats Sarkisian is making to change the team’s non-conference schedule to combat the perceived punishment from Texas losing to No. 1 Ohio State in Columbus to start the season.

“Why do we even play that game? Because if we’re a 10-2 team right now that played four top-10 ranked opponents with three top-10 wins, we’re not even having a discussion right now,” Sarkisian said on SiriusXM’s Full Ride. “So, my point is: Why the hell am I going to play that game next year? For what? What good does it do?”

The other aspect of Sarkisian’s frustration is that the committee isn’t following its stated criteria.

“We’ve played the hardest schedule of all the remaining teams left in the CFP and that’s supposed to be the No. 1 criteria, strength of schedule,” Sarkisian said on Early Signing Day. The second criteria is supposed to be head-to-head competition. Well, there’s two teams that are in there that we beat by multiple scores. So is that head-to-head competition or not?”

Given that behavior from the committee, Texas is ready to resort to drastic scheduling measures. However, in the short term, return games against Ohio State next season and Michigan in 2027 will happen as planned, according to Sarkisian.

“First of all, we’re gonna honor Ohio State and Michigan. We went to Ann Arbor, went to Columbus. We’re gonna honor those return trips,” Sarkisian said. “So for the next two years, we know what our non-conference schedule is going to look like, and that’s the right thing to do — we made the commitment to play them, we will honor that commitment for them to come play us here.”

The home-and-home series with Notre Dame in 2028 and 2029, though?

“I think anything beyond that is up for discussion. CDC and I’ve already had that discussion — we need to take a good hard look at what our non-conference schedule looks like beyond the next two years,” Sarkisian said.

The Texas head coach noted that because those games are scheduled so many years in advance, they were agreed to when the Longhorns were still in the Big 12 conference and had an imperative to add quality home games to sell season tickets, an issue that doesn’t exist in the SEC with renewed rivalries against the Aggies and Razorbacks and other high-profile opponents coming to Austin.

“There’s a little bit of a different shift now that we’re in the Southeastern Conference, and another shift now that we’re going to nine conference games, and so we’ve got to be mindful of, one, putting our players in the best position to have success and to have growth, two, we’ve got to be mindful of how the committee is going to evaluate to put the best teams into the College Football Playoff,” Sarkisian said.

Of course, winning more conference games to make the SEC Championship game and winning that negates this entire discussion, as Sarkisian noted, but the Horns also have to pay attention to how the committee is making decisions.

And those decisions could result in scheduling changes that go against what Del Conte and Sarkisian want, and against the best interests of the sport and its fans.