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Did Notre Dame get cc’ed on some ACC shade?
The final 2025 College Football Playoff rankings release was, to put it politely, a mess.
It was a quite surprising and rare misstep, tbh, by a group that was just revealed to have kept an entirely new selection criteria completely hidden from the public. (Shout out to The Athletic’s Chris Vannini for breaking that story.)
You probably remember the situation, but if not, we’ll do it quickly. For weeks, the committee had Notre Dame ranked above Miami. That was despite Miami’s head-to-head victory early in the season. Both teams sat idle the final week of the season. Duke’s surprise ACC title threw a wrench in everything, and when the final rankings were released, the Hurricanes had leapfrogged the Irish, who were left out entirely.
Commissioner Hunter Yurachek delivered some rather garbled nonsense in the aftermath about the committee finally being able to directly compare Miami and Notre Dame, something they were apparently unable to previously do.
Notre Dame had a right to be upset. Or as upset anyone can be about the always incoherent divinations from college football’s Oracles of Grapevine. The Fighting Irish closed the season as one of the best teams in the country after narrowly losing their first two games to teams ranked by the committee (Miami and Texas A&M).
(For the sake of this piece, we will ignore the actual results of the playoff.)
The following day, Notre Dame Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua lit into the ACC for its perceived preference for a football-playing member of the conference to be included in the bracket.
“We were mystified by the actions of the conference to attack their biggest, really, partner in football and a member of their conference in 24 of our other sports," Bevacqua said. "They have certainly done permanent damage to the relationship between the conference and Notre Dame."
At issue, like for every incandescently aggrieved individual in the year of our Lord 2025, were posts.
The school was upset with tweets from the official @ACCFootball account, one of which was an image macro comparing two anonymous teams.
The other was an image of Carson Beck, with posts arguing for Miami’s inclusion over Notre Dame.
If you’re calling out subtweets, you’ve already lost. But Bevacqua took it further, declaring that, "We were definitely being targeted.”
ACC commissioner Jim Phillips issued a restrained response to the drama.
“When it comes to football, we have a responsibility to support and advocate for all 17 of our football-playing member institutions, and I stand behind our conference efforts to do just that,” he said. “At no time was it suggested by the ACC that Notre Dame was not a worthy candidate for inclusion in the field."
When I heard that, I said to myself, “Oh, I bet they did exactly that,” and started clacking away at a FOIA request. But before I could hit send, the plot thickened.
The next day, The Independent, a Notre Dame podcast, said they heard the ACC accidentally cc’ed the Irish on some of its college football playoff lobbying materials.
Materials you now know exist thanks to the sleuthing efforts of FOIAball.
After co-host Pete Sampson said a “series of tweets is not necessarily grounds for going nuclear," his partner Matt Fortuna replied, “It's beyond that … everything about the social media campaign, etc., is true. From my understanding, the ACC was very sloppy with it. They accidentally cc'ed Notre Dame on some of these conference-wide emails. That really rubbed Notre Dame folks the wrong way.”
Sadly, we cannot reasonably request every single email that anyone at the ACC sent to every school official.
And because the ACC is an independent organization, we had to backdoor our way into this drama. So FOIAball asked ACC teams for communications sent by the conference to athletic directors that covered the ACC’s efforts to campaign for its teams' inclusion in the college football playoff.
Forgive us for hashing up old drama (jk, we live for it), but before we begin, we should note that Notre Dame and the ACC have done their best to bury the hatchet.
In December, Bevacqua met in New York City with Phillips for a two-hour confab that was deemed "highly positive and productive."
In an interview today with The Athletic's Matt Baker, Phillips was asked about the relationship between the two, which he said was “really good.”
“Whatever we went through around the CFP selection, that was put to bed immediately. I think we’re stronger for all that we went through … It’s a really important relationship, and I feel very good about where it’s at and where it’s headed.”
Now, as we said, we don’t have every email. But we have enough to have some theories.
Every week, the conference’s ADs meet for a call. In advance of that, an agenda gets sent to all of them, emails that include Bevacqua.
Throughout November and December, every call included a broad “Football Update” from the ACC’s Vice President of Football.
After every call, the ACC sent their playoff materials out, with Bevacqua removed from the distribution list. It’s a dangerous email game to play, but one they appeared to pull off. We didn’t find Notre Dame’s AD included on all those.
Those emails included a link to online hosting service Box, where the ACC kept “official CFP team sheets for all teams, along with Team Rating Score Rankings and Team Strength, Strength of Record, and Strength of Schedule ratings.”
References, though, to those materials were made in emails that Notre Dame was included on.
In a Nov. 12, 2025 agenda email, the ACC noted they’d be sending out CFP material.
“CFP Materials (Strickland). Will be posted to Box this evening after the selection show.”
Does mentioning the existence of the material in an email constitute an accidental CC? Perhaps. But we have another theory.
While the CFP updates were emailed to the ADs minus Notre Dame, notes from the entire call were also sent out. And the next week, the ACC sent out a Box link with those notes to all ADs, including Notre Dame’s.
The agenda for that call, from a few days earlier, had “CFP Metrics” listed as an item.
And we do know the conference referred to its lobbying materials as “metrics.”
Could the full notes from that call included the ACC’s CFP Metrics in the Box folder? It’s possible. Or, could that link have allowed someone who received it to see other folders? We don’t know. Maybe.
We also have a third theory. The ACC emails 100 other athletics department staffers 100 times a week about 100 different things. So it could have happened elsewhere. We asked Notre Dame if they’d provide FOIAball with the specific record that was behind the claim. They didn’t reply.
As for what the ACC said in its materials about Notre Dame, it did not explicitly say Notre Dame should be excluded from the playoff.
But they aren’t ever going to argue that one team should be specifically kept out. They just repeatedly said that Miami should be ranked above Notre Dame. The ACC said that about other schools, too.
In Week 10, the ACC’s one-pager for Miami said that “with quality wins over CFP contenders Notre Dame & USF, Miami must be ranked higher than Notre Dame.”
In Week 11, they cited “CFP Protocol.”
“Miami has a head-to-head win over ND, and a far stronger result vs. NC State, and Miami has a road win at FSU, where Alabama lost… Miami must be ranked higher than Notre Dame and Alabama.”
The ellipsis there was theirs, and we must respect its excellent usage.
In Week 12, the ACC said, “Miami must be ahead of ND,” citing “same record, head-to-head win, stronger comparative NSCU result.” It went on to also say that the Hurricanes should also be ranked above Alabama, BYU, and Utah.
Additionally, the ACC published resume comparisons for Miami and Notre Dame, as well as Miami and other schools. You can see all the one-pagers here.
By arguing for one team’s inclusion, you are transitively arguing for another's exclusion. But in no instance did the ACC say Notre Dame sucks.
FOIAball did find one little bit of a statistics-based slight. In a Week 12 “Football Messaging” email from the ACC’s comms team about the school’s CFP push, it mentioned Notre Dame’s “vaunted” rushing attack and compared its total against Boston College to other schools.
“Notre Dame's common opponent performance vs. ACC teams/BC should also be noted. BC's 6 ACC opponents have averaged 211 yards per game. ND's vaunted rushing attack gained 159 yards,” pointing out that Louisville ran for 317 yards, Clemson for 226, SMU for 222, and Stanford for 213.
Notre Dame wasn’t cc’ed on that email. The only team that should be mad about getting dunked on is the Eagles.
So you may be wondering where your FOIAbites is. It’s not here this week. We decided to go with two scoops instead. But we’ll be back next week with a revolutionary new way to make wings that is perfect for the Super Bowl. See you then.
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