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Freezing Notre Dame Out of Future Schedules Sounds Like a Great Idea
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Let’s take a quick break from the Eagles to get the latest on Notre Dame.
If you missed all of the hubbub, the CliffsNotes is that the Domers were left out of the College Football Playoff with a 10-2 record. They lost to playoff participants Texas A&M and Miami while their best wins were against Southern Cal and Pitt, who finished the season #16 and unranked, respectively.
Afterward, Notre Dame’s Athletic Director went on an aggressive media tour, criticizing the ACC with allegations that the conference tried to torpedo ND’s resume, which is funny when you think about it, because is a conference going to show preference for a full member, or a half member? A question for the philosophers, perhaps.
Anyway, that brings us to this:
Wolken is a Notre Dame hater and the guy who claimed that ND players said mean things in the locker room last year.
So we add that caveat while noting that his Yahoo story is more of a column and not a report, though it has this particular nugget dropped in:
Notre Dame’s 2026 schedule isn’t shaping up much better. Maybe Wisconsin, Michigan State, Stanford or North Carolina will get their act together. But aside from a home game against Miami and a trip to Southern Cal, it’s not good.
And it’s probably going to get worse, especially if Notre Dame can’t come to an agreement with USC to extend their longstanding rivalry. Texas, also smarting from missing the CFP, has made noise about canceling its series with Notre Dame in 2028-29. Athletic directors in other leagues, who learned from Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger on Sunday about the memorandum of understanding that grants Notre Dame preferential playoff access, are threatening to freeze them out of future schedules. (Who knows if they’ll follow through. For all its issues, Notre Dame fills stadiums and drives TV ratings.)
This MOU guarantees the Domers a playoff spot if they finish ranked inside of the top 12. Special treatment for the Irish, per the norm. Everybody else plays by something at least resembling a set of rules, while Notre Dame looks out for its own best interests and then throws a hissy fit if they don’t get their way.
Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark, on the other hand, didn’t whine and complain when BYU was left out (despite having the better wins than ND and a better overall resume), and said this about Irish AD Pete Bevacqua:
There was a report from Front Office Sports that Notre Dame didn’t rank in the top-10 of most-watched college football teams this year. And only one of their individual games was ranked in the top-20, which was the season opener against Miami. You could say that the ACC being mostly garbage this year is to blame for a lot of that, but the story notes that viewership for the traditional USC game wasn’t amazing either.
So is Notre Dame really that special? That’s the question. What do they have and what do they do that justifies treatment different from every other team that plays in a conference in 2025? And what’s to stop the conference commissioners from icing these guys out entirely, in response to this public arrogance? Why do they need Notre Dame on their schedule? They don’t. If you’re so special and so much better than everybody else, go make your own slate without the ACC or Big 10 or SEC. Go play UConn and some G5 schools and see how that works out for you. And ESPN doesn’t need Notre Dame games when they already have the CFP and the SEC.
Notre Dame hasn’t won a title since 1988 and they only have five top-10 finishes going back 20 years now. What are the Irish in 2025? They’re just another team.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com