Notre Dame was on the verge of making the College Football Playoff until its drubbing at the hands of Miami last weekend. Now the Fighting Irish are definitely out of the Playoff picture, but still have a chance to finish the season with only two losses and go to a very good bowl game. However, USA Today analyst and college football handicapper believes that Notre Dame is not as good as everyone else thinks.
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The schedule would be considerably tougher playing in the SEC since they would have to actually play an entire conference slate rather than the half ACC schedule they play now. They likely wouldn't play bad teams like Temple, North Carolina, Wake Forest and Miami (Ohio). Depending on which division they would be in, they could end up playing LSU, Auburn, Alabama and Texas A&M in a given year. That's considerably tougher than their current schedule and would make it much harder to go 8-2 up to this point in the season.
They already lost to Georgia —- by one point, yes —- and Auburn destroyed Georgia so the transitive property of math and winning means that Auburn would have annihilated Notre Dame too, right? Even if that math isn't quite solid, it's hard to rationalize the Fighting Irish being much better than 6th in the conference like Sheridan says. They wouldn't be better than Georgia, Alabama, Auburn, LSU or Mississippi State at this point.
[h/t Saturday Down South]