What Gives for Notre Dame After Another College Football Playoff Blowout Loss?

After yet another disappointing showing on college football's grand stage, Notre Dame appears to be hopelessly stuck in an "always the bridesmaid, never the national champion" rut.

Alabama was a heavy favorite to win the Rose Bowl, so it's no surprise that the Crimson Tide were never truly challenged in their 31-14 victory over the Fighting Irish. And that result was merely the latest that suggests Notre Dame is on the wrong side of the ravine between the haves and the have-nots.

Notre Dame is a very good college football team. Iconic, one might say. Last summer, ESPN rated the Fighting Irish as the second-best program in the sport's history.

Most of that was rooted in ancient history, though, as Notre Dame has not won many noteworthy games since the early 1990s.

In the past quarter century, Notre Dame has spent a grand total of three weeks ranked No. 1 in the AP poll. This is going to be just the third time in those 25 years that the Fighting Irish finish a season ranked No. 8 or better. And in all three of those years, they got destroyed in the postseason.

Between the 2012 BCS Championship, the 2018 Cotton Bowl and the 2020 Rose Bowl, Notre Dame was outscored 103-31.

It's not just in bowl season, either.

Since the start of the 1999 season, Notre Dame has played 23 games against teams ranked in the AP Top Five. It went 2-21 in those games. The wins were a September 2005 victory over a third-ranked Michigan that went on to lose five games and finished unranked, and the double-overtime home victory over short-handed Clemson earlier this season.

At its best, Notre Dame can be clearly better than about 98 percent of other teams in the country.

Cracking that top 2 percent, though, has been an insurmountable climb.

And unless something changes on the recruiting front, that's going to remain the case for the foreseeable future.

Ron Jenkins/Associated Press

That isn't to say Notre Dame recruits poorly. Per 247Sports, the Fighting Irish have put together a top-20 recruiting class every year dating back to 2006. They'll usually grab around a half dozen of the top 150 high school seniors in any given cycle. That's why they're consistently solid and have averaged 9.4 wins per year over the past decade—even with that 4-8 dud in 2016.

For most of those top-20 classes, though, they ranked outside the top 10.

In 247Sports history (aka since 2000), Notre Dame has signed a total of 16 5-star recruits—only two of whom came in the past seven recruiting cycles.

During that same seven-year stretch (2014-20), here's a sampling of other 5-star hauls: 16 for LSU, 17 for Ohio State, 17 for Clemson, 27 for Georgia and 30 for Alabama. Even Oklahoma—which has been stuck in the same purgatory as Notre Dame in recent years—signed a trio of 5-star guys in its 2019 class.

In the college football arms race, Notre Dame is bringing a butter knife to a gun fight.

That talent gap couldn't have been much more evident in the Rose Bowl.

Notre Dame running back Kyren Williams had a remarkable season, shredding a lot of decent-to-good defenses for a hair better than 122 yards from scrimmage per game. And Notre Dame tried like mad to get him going against Alabama. He led the team in both rushing attempts and receptions, yet even with those 24 touches, he only managed 95 yards against a Crimson Tide defense full of soon-to-be NFL players.

Notre Dame's defense also had a great year in the ACC, limiting opponents to 18.6 points and 335 total yards. And while the Fighting Irish did a better job of slowing down Alabama than anyone has in the past two seasons, it still felt a little like that steamroller scene from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

(That's right. It's 2021 and I'm referencing a movie that was released in 1997. But you know exactly what I'm talking about.)

Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press

Najee Harris had no difficulty racking up 155 total yards, including putting poor Nick McCloud on a poster with one of the best hurdles you'll ever see.

DeVonta Smith added seven smooth receptions for 130 receiving yards and three touchdowns.

And it wasn't until late in the fourth quarter that the Fighting Irish finally broke through the Alabama offensive line for a sack of Mac Jones, who—aside from a hideous-looking slide at the end of a third-down scramble in the third quarter—was oh so comfortable in the pocket all night.

It would be a bit harsh to say it looked like men playing against boys, as Notre Dame does have a decent stockpile of NFL prospects. However, there was no question which team had the most future first-round draft picks at its disposal, as was the case in both 2012 and 2018, too.

Look, Notre Dame certainly isn't the only good team that Alabama has throttled during Nick Saban's 14 years at the helm. And I'm not trying to say there's no chance Notre Dame could win a national championship in the next decade.

However, there's a pretty clear competitive imbalance in college football that makes it all but impossible to envision Notre Dame entering any future CFP as the favorite to win it all. Again, barring some seismic shift in recruiting, the Fighting Irish are likely to always be a sizable underdog when they make the playoff—and that's only going to get worse if and when it expands to eight teams and they have to go through an additional team with at least five times as many 5-star recruits as there are on Notre Dame's roster.

Recruiting stars aren't everything and they don't guarantee anything. Alabama has had some 5-star duds. Notre Dame has found some serious diamonds in the rough. Perhaps there will be a perfect storm for the Fighting Irish in the next couple of years.

There's just no denying the annual talent gap in this sport, though.

Kerry Miller covers college football and men's college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter, @kerrancejames. Recruit ratings via 247Sports.