The College Football Playoff expanded from four teams to 12 in 2024, giving more opportunities to teams that believed they deserved a chance at a championship but did not get one under the previous format.
While 12 fan bases will head into mid-December with hope of seeing their team make a deep run, a handful walked away from Sunday's bracket reveal heavily disappointed.
It's entirely possible none of the teams excluded from the field had a legitimate chance to win a national championship. Perhaps Ohio State or Indiana just isn't beatable, or winning on the road would have been too tall of a task for some of the teams that just missed the cut. Still, a few fan bases fully believed their teams earned that chance and didn't receive it on Sunday.
Here's a closer look at which teams were snubbed from the College Football Playoff in 2025.
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College Football Playoff snubs 2025
Notre Dame (10-2)
After Notre Dame lost to Miami and Texas A&M to start the season, the thought was they could still play their way into the playoff by winning their final 10 games. The Fighting Irish did just that, but in the end, it still wasn't enough after the committee jumped Miami over Notre Dame in Sunday's final rankings.
Notre Dame is going to have a bone to pick with the committee, as Alabama jumped ahead of the Irish in the penultimate rankings despite both teams winning during rivalry week. Notre Dame walloped Stanford, while Alabama narrowly escaped a five-win Auburn team on the road. The committee said after the decision that Alabama's "gutsy" fourth-down call in a rivalry game swayed the committee, and that decision set up Notre Dame to drop out when BYU's loss forced a head-to-head debate between Miami and the Irish.
While Miami had the head-to-head win over Notre Dame, Sunday marked the first time the Hurricanes were ranked ahead of the Irish since the committee started releasing rankings in November.
On Sunday, committee chair Hunter Yurachek confirmed BYU's loss forced the committee to evaluate Notre Dame and Miami head-to-head. "The one metric we had to fall back on was the head-to-head," Yurachek said, explaining that the team's resumes were otherwise nearly identical.
Yurachek told ESPN he had the committee re-watch Miami's win over Notre Dame from September, stating multiple times that BYU's loss changed the equation and forced a closer look between the Hurricanes and Fighting Irish. Yurachek also said the possibility of no ACC team making the playoff had no impact on the committee's decision.
Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua told Yahoo Sports on Sunday that the decision felt "like a collective feeling that we were all just punched in the stomach."
"We feel like the playoff was stolen from our student-athletes," Bevacqua said, arguing that there is "no explanation" that can justify the committee's decision.
MORE: Breaking down how Miami passed Notre Dame for CFP
Vanderbilt (10-2)
When three-loss Alabama team was nearly included in the College Football Playoff last year the idea of a two-loss SEC team being excluded from the playoff seemed unrealistic. As Vanderbilt kept winning this season, however, so did the teams above the Commodores, blocking Clark Lea's team from the playoff.
Most years, this Vanderbilt team would likely be a playoff team. The Commodores didn't face the absolute toughest SEC schedule, but their only losses came against fellow top-15 teams, and they picked up a convincing road win over Tennessee to close out the season after beating Missouri and LSU earlier in the season.
With a strength of record that ranks 11th in college football, Vanderbilt found itself on the wrong side of the cutline partly because of the way the dominoes fell around it late in the season.
Texas (9-3)
Before he even had a chance to walk off the field after his team's rivalry win over Texas A&M, Texas coach Steve Sarkisian started pleading his case for a playoff bid. If some results went his way the following day, he might have gotten his wish.
Ultimately, there wasn't room for a three-loss SEC team, the same way there wasn't room for Alabama or South Carolina to sneak into last year's field. The Longhorns had a solid season, but a loss to Florida in addition to losses against elite Ohio State and Georgia teams was the tipping point.
Sarkisian made the case that Texas should not have ever scheduled the Ohio State game because he believes his team would have been a lock if it were 10-2. Would it? Vanderbilt went 10-2 and similarly didn't have many wins that jump off the page, plus the Commodores had no loss as bad as Texas' loss to Florida. Texas beat Vanderbilt, which would give the Longhorns an edge in that battle, but it's hard to blame the committee for deciding the Longhorns weren't quite playoff-worthy, as talented as they might be.
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BYU (11-2)
BYU lost to Texas Tech twice this season, falling on the road in November and in the Big 12 championship game on Saturday. The Cougars handled business against every other team on their schedule, but those losses cost them a playoff berth.
Interestingly, BYU was already on the outside looking in before its second loss to the Red Raiders, ranking 11th but missing the projected field because of automatic qualifiers who were ranked lower.
The committee believes Texas Tech is one of the four best teams in the country, at least by resume, because it gave the Red Raiders a first round bye. Should two losses to the same elite team keep BYU out of a 12-team playoff? The Cougars beat five teams that had a winning record in Big 12 play, knocking off Utah, Iowa State, Arizona, TCU and Cincinnati, with three of those wins coming on the road.
College Football Playoff selection criteria
While some criticize the selection committee for everything from double standards to contradiction, the committee does have a specific criteria it is supposed to follow.
"The selection committee ranks the schools based on the members’ evaluation of their performance on the field, using strength of schedule, head-to-head results, and comparison of results against common opponents," the College Football Playoff website says.
Strength of schedule, head-to-head results and common opponents are listed as the three main points of criteria for the committee, all feeding into an evaluation of each team as a whole.
The topic of head-to-head results was at the heart of one of this year's biggest playoff debates, with Miami beating Notre Dame early in the season but finishing just behind the Fighting Irish in the rankings despite both teams having an identical 10-2 record.