Snubbed from playoff, Texas A&M faces UNC
Mack Brown thinks the Texas A&M Aggies are College Football Playoffworthy. Jimbo Fisher is just ready to look ahead after getting left out.
The two coaches are now set to meet next month in the 2021 Orange Bowl as Texas A&M — the topranked non-Playoff team — will face off against the North Carolina Tar Heels in South Florida.
The No. 5 Aggies will get a top-15 matchup as a consolation prize after the CFP selection committee chose the No. 1 Alabama Crimson Tide, No. 2 Clemson Tigers, No. 3 Ohio State Buckeyes and No. 4 Notre Dame Fighting Irish as the four teams vying for the 2021 CFP National Championship. Texas A&M will face No. 14 North Carolina at 8 p.m. on Jan. 2 at Hard Rock Stadium.
“I would like to see us expand the playoff system,” Brown said, “because there’s no doubt that A&M deserves to be in.”
Said Fisher: “There’s no frustration. We’re excited to be going to the Orange Bowl because we’re in a New Year’s Six game. ... You get in, you get out, you’ve got to move. You go to the future.”
For both teams, it will be the culmination of breakthrough seasons for two of college football’s potential rising powers.
The Aggies finished with just one loss to Alabama and Fisher said Saturday he thought Texas A&M was deserving of a spot in the Playoff and there was an outside chance for it to happen after Clemson beat Notre Dame, 34-10, in the 2020 Atlantic Coast Conference Championship Game on Saturday.
The Tar Heels finished with three losses, but wrapped up the regular season with a 62-26 rout of the then-No. 9 Miami Hurricanes on Dec. 5 in Miami Gardens to finish as the ACC’s highest ranked non-Playoff team. Both
teams are playing in their first New Year’s Six game.
Texas A&M (8-1, 8-1 Southeastern) did play in one Bowl Championship Series game in 1998 and have played in more than a dozen major bowls throughout the year, including 13 trips to the Cotton Bowl Classic, two trips to the Sugar Bowl and one other trip to the Orange
Bowl in 1944.
In Fisher’s third season, the Aggies will have a chance to finish in the top five for only the second time since 1956 and achieve their highest yearend ranking since they last won a national title in 1939.
“It shows the trajectory we’re on and what we’re trying to accomplish, that we are being relevant in the national conversations and where we’re going. Our brand is becoming a national brand,” Fisher said. “We’ve got a great state here in Texas that we want to recruit the heck out of, but we also got to brand ourselves nationally across the board and I think it sends a sign to players out there that, hey, A&M is on the rise.”
North Carolina, which landed at No. 13 in the final CFP rankings Sunday, has never played in a BCS game and will have a chance to win its first-ever major bowl game.
The Tar Heels lost the 1950 Cotton Bowl Classic and have otherwise never played in one of the major bowls, although they played in the Peach Bowl five times before it was elevated to major status as part of the New Year’s Six.
In Brown’s second season, North Carolina (8-3, 7-3) had its best year since the end of Brown’s first tenure in Chapel Hill, when he led the Tar Heels to 1998 Gator Bowl and their only year-end top-five ranking.
“What you want is verification to your players and your staff that what you’re doing is working, and they’re reaping a reward at the end of the second year that most people don’t get a chance to do,” Brown said. “There will never be a team that will be more excited about coming to the bowl game than ours.”
North Carolina and Texas A&M make it 10 different teams to play in the Orange Bowl in the last seven seasons. Last season, the Florida Gators beat the Virginia Cavaliers in Florida’s first trip to the game since 2002.
The year before, Alabama beat the Oklahoma Sooners in a Playoff semifinal before losing to Clemson in the 2019 CFP National Championship. The Hurricanes played in the 2017 game, losing to the Wisconsin Badgers at their home stadium.