Match games

 Oh, they are crafty ones, these men in suits who are the gatekeepers for the College Football Playoff. Why, just looked what they did yesterday, when they unveiled the first 12-team CFP bracket with, presumably, a herald of trumpets and all the proper flourishes.

They gave us Indiana vs. Notre Dame. That's what they did.

They gave us the matchup everyone in these parts wanted, and don't even try to tell me it was just a smile from the football gods or mere happenstance that made it happen. My suspicious mind, working overtime as it always does, will always believe the men in suits played match games with the seedings until they got IU-at-ND. Of course they did.

Notre Dame was slotted fifth in the final CFP poll and Indiana eighth, but they wound up the 7-vs.-10 game in the bracket. This despite the fact neither team played last week (and so didn't lose), while Texas lost the SEC title game to Georgia and Penn State lost the Big Ten championship game to Oregon.

Notre Dame, at 11-1 and ranked as high as third in the other relevant polls, therefore would logically have seemed at least a 6-seed. But, nah. Penn State (11-2) got the 6-seed -- and was somehow still ranked fourth in the final CFP poll despite the loss to Oregon.

So, yeah. You can't convince me there wasn't some jacking around going on to get Indiana against Notre Dame.

That happens on Dec. 20 at Notre Dame, and it promises to be a lot more interesting than the last time the teams met, 33 years ago. Jerome Bettis was playing for the Irish then Vaughn Dunbar was his opposite number for Indiana. They're, respectively, 52 and 56 years old now.

So it's been awhile. Notre Dame brushed the Hoosiers aside 49-27 that day in 1991, but it might as well have happened in 1291 for all the relevance it has to 2024. Notre Dame, for instance, is on its fifth head coach since then. Indiana is on its seventh. 

Both are 11-1 this time around, and both have their skeptics. Indiana has for the most part crushed everyone it's played except Ohio State, but most of the people the Hoosiers crushed were eminently crushable. Notre Dame, on the other hand, has that increasingly bizarre loss to a middling MAC school (Northern Illinois), but they've crushed almost everyone else on a schedule less crushable than Indiana's.

So, who knows. But the good news is, now we'll all have a reason to  guess.

Thank you, crafty men in suits. Thank you.