Report: Notre Dame's Sun Bowl Selection Drawn from Hat After FSU Playoff Controversy

The College Football Playoff selection committee's decision to snub Florida State in favor of Alabama had far-reaching implications for the rest of the postseason bowl games.

Especially the Sun Bowl.

According to Stewart Mandel of The Athletic, a variety of rearranged bowl matchups meant that Notre Dame was eligible to be selected by the Duke's Mayo Bowl, Pinstripe Bowl and Sun Bowl, and all three picked the No. 16 Fighting Irish as its top selection.

Per that report "the ACC then followed its prescribed process, leading to... its attorney writing each bowl's name on a piece of paper and drawing it out of a hat," with the Sun Bowl getting picked. That set up a highly anticipated matchup between Notre Dame and Oregon State.

Here's a general idea of how Florida State's snub altered the entire bowl landscape, as reported by Mandel:

Louisville was expected to be the Orange Bowl selection, but the Seminoles instead got that berth, setting up a very intriguing matchup with Georgia. The lack of a second ACC team in the New Year's Six meant that Ole Miss slid into the Peach Bowl against Penn State.

The Duke's Mayo Bowl, meanwhile, is an SEC-affiliated bowl but now had no eligible team. It instead negotiated to get West Virginia and eventually North Carolina to face them.

Then there were the complications facing the Gator Bowl, Holiday Bowl and Pop-Tarts, which in theory would have each had its pick of top ACC schools, out of Louisville, Notre Dame, Clemson, North Carolina and NC State. ACC rules stipulated that Louisville and NC State had to be two of the teams picked, while the bowls reportedly were told by the ACC that the Fighting Irish weren't available.

Per Mandel, an ACC official noted that Notre Dame was "eligible for selection, but under the selection guidelines, their selection by one of those bowls was not guaranteed."

One thing it did do on Sunday was cause major delays in actually announcing the bowl lineups:

After a series of complicated negotiations and maneuvering—NC State had played the Holiday Bowl in 2021 so it wasn't eligible to return, while Kentucky was already in the Gator Bowl, ruling out a rematch with Louisville—Clemson ended up in the Gator Bowl, NC State in the Pop-Tarts Bowl and Louisville in the Holiday Bowl.

"(FSU's snub) was unfortunate for college football," Holiday Bowl executive director Mark Neville told Mandel, "but for us, it worked out that we got the No. 15 team in the country coming out here."

It all set the stage for Notre Dame's name to come out of the hat for the Sun Bowl.

"It was kind of a shocker when we finally got the call," Sun Bowl executive director Bernie Olivas told El Paso's KTSM (h/t Nick Bromberg of Yahoo Sports).

He added that he and the Sun Bowl football committee "gasped" when he learned that Notre Dame was one of the schools available in the pool to be selected. It was a good day for the Sun Bowl, but a very weird day for college football in general.