Stephen A. Smith's Notre Dame Math Is Actually Not Correct

It's only First Take and just yesterday we sort of sided with the idea that the people on there should say click-provoking things instead of educating the audience because that's the accepted play but Stephen A. Smith's comments on Notre Dame are spreading around and we can't help but notice that they are a little silly.

Discussing the new process of filling out the new and hopefully improved College Football Playoff with Paul Finebaum and Chris Russo yesterday, Smith said the following: "You talk about you have no sympathy for Notre Dame. Why are they even relevant?"

The Irish are proudly not a member of a conference for football so they cannot snatch up one of the automatic berths given to the those winners. Their path forward is still fairly straightforward: just be one of the top seven at-large schools in the only rankings that matter.

Yes, Notre Dame has not won a national championship since 1988. The one time they played for one they got annihilated by Alabama. But Smith's possibly rhetorical question about what they hell they've done is easily answered and the facts prove that they are so much more than a program that rides on the coattails of their former greatness. Which, by the way, is more than enough to make them relevant, but let's look at some recent data.

The Irish have been among the top-12 teams or at the very least sniffing around that status in seven of the last eight seasons. They have finished in the top-8 in half of the past eight years. Those numbers get even better when you factor in the 12-1 campaign that the Crimson Tide derailed.

There are very few schools that can make the same claim. From 1989-2006 they finished in the top-17 ten different times. They wouldn't have made a 12-team playoff in all of those years, obviously, but they would have been in the conversation. At minimum, a player.

Since that national championship Notre Dame has been in the postseason AP Top 25 in 22 of 35 tries. I know that we're working hard to ruin college football to the point that only like three teams matter but come on.

Also, things change. Michigan had one shared national title since 1948 before making the playoff three straight years and winning it all last month. Georgia's incredible run beginning in 2017 came after 37 years of a title drought. Washington, who lost to those Wolverines, hasn't won a crown since 1991.

I don't know what to tell you. There are a lot of college football teams. They can't all win. But 90 percent of them would kill to trade places with Notre Dame's results, let alone their cache.