Week 14 Anger Index: Why Notre Dame deserves the benefit of the doubt

We don't talk nearly enough about luck in sports.

It's only reasonable to want to believe the best team always wins, that the outcome of a game is the reward for a better process, that, in the end, we all get what we deserve.

But then you watch 10 minutes of Florida State football and it's impossible to deny that there are football gods at work and they can be awfully vengeful.

And so it is that, at this late point in the season, the College Football Playoff rankings still hinge, in no small part, on a botched extra point at the end of Notre Dame-Texas A&M.

We can look back at Miami 's game against SMU on Nov. 1 -- a game that, with 2 minutes to go the Canes had a 90% chance of winning, according to ESPN's metrics -- and consider it a bad loss, then a week later, see Oregon --