No. 7 Texas A&M earns first College Football Playoff berth, will host No. 10 Miami

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) - Texas A&M might not possess a first-round bye in the 2025 College Football Playoffs, but confidence runs plentiful. Is there any annoyance that the Aggies were out of the running for a bye or a Group of 5 first-round opponent?

“I don’t think any of that will really matter when we end up winning it all,” A&M offensive lineman Trey Zuhn III said.

Texas A&M remained No. 7 in the final College Football Playoff rankings of the season and will host a first-round matchup against No. 10 Miami in Kyle Field on Dec. 20 at 11:00 a.m.

Should the Aggies win the first-round game, they would play in the Cotton Bowl against No. 2 Ohio State in the quarterfinals on Dec. 31 at 6:30 p.m.

The No. 7 ranking pits the Aggies against a Miami squad that was ranked No. 2 in the Associated Press poll early in the season, and not No. 11 Tulane that will travel to No. 6 Ole Miss, or No. 12 James Madison that will battle No. 5 Oregon in Eugene.

“It’s an honor to be able to play in the playoffs and especially get another home game at Kyle Field,” Zuhn said Sunday. “You know, there’s no better feeling than that. But, you know, we didn’t come here just to get to the playoffs. We came here to win it all.”

After maintaining a No. 3 ranking throughout the first four weeks of the top 25, the Aggies fell to No. 7 in the penultimate rankings after losing to Texas in the final week of the regular season. The loss to Texas knocked the Aggies out of contention for the SEC Championship due to the conference tie breakers and a first-round bye as a top 4 seed.

“We’re looking forward to hosting a game at Kyle Field, trying to get that bad taste out of our mouth and go from here,” A&M linebacker Taurean York said.

There was never any consideration by the committee in flipping A&M with No. 6 Ole Miss, CFP committee chair Hunter Yurachek said on a media teleconference Sunday.

“Those teams, five through eight, none of whom played this weekend in any type of championship game scenario, we didn’t feel like we had anything from the championship games that were played that impact the standing of Ole Miss versus Texas A&M,” he said.

Miami jumped into the playoff bracket in the final rankings after sitting at No. 12 in the penultimate rankings. They held a 27-24 head-to-head win over Notre Dame in the first week of the season. After holding a No. 10 ranking in last week’s top 25, the Fighting Irish fell out of the final bracket.

Formally No. 11 BYU losing big to No. 4 Texas Tech in the Big 12 Championship put Miami in a situation to be considered for the final at-large berth into the playoffs, Yurachek told ESPN.

“Once we moved Miami ahead of BYU, then we had that side-by-side comparison that everybody had been hungering for, with Notre Dame and Miami,” Yurachek said. “You look at those two teams on paper, they are almost equal in their schedule strength, their common opponents, their results against common opponents. But the one metric we had to fall back on again was the head-to-head.”

The Hurricanes finished with the 14th-highest strength of record and a strength of schedule that ranked No. 45, according to ESPN. A&M ended with the third-best strength of record, behind No. 1 Indiana and No. 3 Georgia, and the 16th strength of schedule.

It was Miami’s losses to Louisville and SMU midway through the season that had the Hurricanes holding their breath come Selection Sunday. Miami had 13 players listed as “out” or a “game-time decision” in the conference availability report prior to the SMU game. They had seven players out against Louisville.

“In the middle of the season, we got banged up,” Miami head coach Mario Cristobal told ESPN. “We weren’t playing at a high level — to our highest level, I should say. But no one ever made an excuse. We just played a lot of young guys... Our team just got better and better and better to the point where, by the end of the season, those last four weeks, the data is that of a team that’s playing at a top-five level just about every single category."

The Cotton Bowl is the quarterfinal destination for this matchup, because Miami eliminated the Orange Bowl as an option, Yurachek confirmed. Should the Hurricanes win the first-round matchup, a berth in the Orange Bowl would be a literal home game for Miami, as Hard Rock Stadium, where the Orange Bowl is played, is their home venue. It would be a disadvantage for the higher-seeded Ohio State.

The Aggies have faced the Hurricanes five times, the last a 48-33 loss at Miami in 2023. A&M beat Miami 17-9 in Kyle Field as the first leg of the home-and-home series in 2022. The first matchup between the teams was in 1944, when the Aggies won 70-14.

A&M head coach Mike Elko has a familiarity with Cristobal and the Hurricanes from his time in the Atlantic Coast Conference at Duke. The two matched up in their first seasons at the respective schools in 2022, with Elko’s Blue Devils taking the contest 45-21 at Miami.

“I think Mario has done a phenomenal job with that program, building the talent level and certainly one of the more talented teams in the country, and certainly going to be hungry to prove that the committee got it right by putting them in," Elko said. “So, it’s going to be a huge challenge for our program, but certainly excited for the opportunity.”

Though the Aggies knew their name would flash onto the television as a part of this year’s playoff bracket, there was excitement at what this team had accomplished. Now, it’s about proving themselves on the biggest stage.

“It’s like I told the guys, ‘That was never the goal. That was the first goal, right?’” Elko said. “The first goal was to get the name on the board. Now, we’ve got to go out, and we’ve got to prove that we belong there. We’ve got to prove that we’ve earned it, and we’re going to have to do it against a very difficult football team.”

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