Thank you, Baylor – now enjoy the Fiesta Bowl

Notre Dame fans are delighted this afternoon as the Baylor Bears knocked off Oklahoma State in the Big 12 championship and the Cowboys out of College Football Playoff contention. The win helps Notre Dame in that the Irish are now seemingly the fifth-rated team with No. 1 Georgia and No. 3 Alabama set to play this afternoon and No. 2 Michigan and No. Cincinnati both also in action later today.

ESPN has started pushing this narrative on the broadcast and Five Thirty Eight, who we’ve followed the work of a lot this season, still aren’t buying into Notre Dame’s chances.

Five Thirty Eight has updated their College Football Playoff odds after the Big 12 championship game’s conclusion and now give Baylor a 58% chance to make the tournament while only giving Notre Dame a 23% shot.

Uhh, what?

Baylor has a great win over Oklahoma State. They also lost to Oklahoma State earlier in the year. Does that simply get erased because they beat them when given a second chance?

More importantly, their 30-28 loss at TCU (who finished 5-7) still occurred.

Here’s also a kind reminder that Baylor’s win over BYU was nice but in scheduling Texas Southern and Texas State out of conference they removed themselves from being able to claim their “13th data point” of the Big 12 championship carrying significant weight versus a Notre Dame team that played 12 games.

And who didn’t play Texas Southern.

I know they have more top-25 wins than Notre Dame as the Irish have none but are you seriously going to say that the TCU loss just gets erased? Notre Dame had some ugly wins along the way but do you realize what they did in all of those cases?

They won aside from a loss to Cincinnati, who very possibly will be a CFP team.

If wins and losses don’t matter then what are we really doing here?

If you’re a Notre Dame fan one of the two biggest dominoes that needed to fall Saturday has fallen. Now get rooting for Georgia to knock out Alabama and the Irish should be in business.

Assuming the cards weren’t already determined to be stacked against Notre Dame, anyway.