There’s a chance the upcoming College Football Playoff could feature a unique first: a final four team without its full-time head coach.

Notre Dame is No. 6 in Tuesday night’s updated College Football Playoff rankings, behind Georgia, Michigan, Alabama, Cincinnati and Oklahoma State. As an independent team, Notre Dame does not have a conference championship game this weekend. But what happens to the 11-1 Irish if multiple top-5 lose in conference championship games?

CFP chair Gary Barta was asked multiple questions about how the selection committee will treat Notre Dame with head coach Brian Kelly now at LSU.

Here’s what Barta said, from the media teleconference transcript.

Q. Wanted to talk about the coaching changes and availability. In the instance of a team that has a coach or a player injury, but doesn’t play in the championship game, is there a way you can kind of weigh that? Or is it kind of a situation where if they don’t play, so you can’t really evaluate a difference without a coach?

GARY BARTA: You broke up a little bit but I think you got the gist of your question. I’ll try to give it an answer. For everybody on the call just a reminder, during the regular season, we don’t look forward at all. So if we know someone is going to have a game coming up, we don’t evaluate that. We only evaluate games that have occurred. And if a coach or a player wasn’t available for that, during the game that we’re evaluating, then we bring that into the discussion.

For championship, after the championships are all played and for our final ranking, referring to the committee does have in our protocol the ability to consider any players that won’t be available or any coaches that won’t be available and then factor that in along with our other protocol, our other criteria.

So, again, I didn’t hear all of your question, but yes, if we get done, when the championships are done and if anybody is in our conversations that has a player that won’t be available, and the committee deems that it’s likely it will affect the outcome, but that’s the words in the protocol, then that can be discussed and can be considered. And each of the 13 members can weigh that the way they want to weigh it, compared to head-to-head competition and common opponents and all the other things we evaluate.

Kelly’s departure came up again in a follow-up question:

Q. Gary, following up on the Notre Dame question, I know that, as you said, the committee does not try to project when looking at the regular season. But I guess a two-part thing here: One, I guess it’s difficult to ignore the reality of the situation that you guys are sitting there talking last night or even this morning that the news is breaking that Brian Kelly is leaving Notre Dame. But also isn’t Notre Dame in a much different situation than these other teams considering that they do not have a conference championship to be looking forward to and for you to judge, and that now that their regular season is over? So in a way that if you were to discuss it this past week, you would not be discussing or trying to project what’s going to happen in the conference championship; you actually are projecting how it will affect it in the postseason. And that’s what’s actually in the principles and protocols.

GARY BARTA: There was a lot in there. Here’s the way the committee talked about it and views it. Champ games are going to occur, and some of the top 10 or go down to top 15, wherever you want to stop, will have an opportunity to play in a Big 10 champ game, in the case of Michigan, or Big 12, in the case of Oklahoma State and Baylor, et cetera, et cetera.

But there’s also going to be a team that’s going to lose each of those games. And there’s going to be teams that don’t play. There’s going to be winners and losers in the champ games and those that don’t play.

I can’t project how that’s going to impact a particular team like Notre Dame or Ohio State or Mississippi because they don’t play. But when all the champ games are done, that’s when we’ll do our homework. That’s when, if there is a team that’s going into a game, where we can project whether or not a player or a coach not available is going to make a difference.