With the contract between USC and Notre Dame set to expire and one of college football’s most storied rivalries in serious danger of ending, officials at USC extended an offer to Notre Dame earlier this month in hopes of continuing the historic series for at least one more season — through the fall of 2026 — a person familiar with the negotiations not authorized to discuss them publicly told The Times.
The future of the rivalry beyond that, in the eyes of USC’s leaders, hinges in large part on what happens with the format of the College Football Playoff — namely, the number of automatic qualifiers guaranteed to the Big Ten in future playoff fields. And until those questions are answered, USC leaders agree the best course forward for its century-old rivalry with Notre Dame would be to continue their arrangement one season at a time.
Anything else would be “a strategically bad decision,” a USC source said.
That timeline is where the two rivals find themselves at an impasse. Notre Dame is seeking a long-term extension of the series, and in an interview with Sports Illustrated earlier this week, Irish athletic director Pete Bevacqua not so subtly suggested that it was USC putting the rivalry at risk.
“I think Southern Cal and Notre Dame should play every year for as long as college football is played,” he told SI’s Pat Forde, “and SC knows that’s how we feel.”
The two blueblood programs have played 95 times since 1924, when the story goes that the wife of legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne convinced her husband to schedule the series so she could visit Southern California every other year. In the century since, only World War II and the COVID-19 pandemic have stood in the way of USC and Notre Dame meeting on the football field. Between them, the two rivals boast 16 national titles, more than any other teams that play an annual college football series.
They’re scheduled to meet again in October in South Bend. What happens to the historic series after that matchup may come down to who blinks in a high-stakes game of chicken between the two schools.
USC has no plans to budge on its position without clarity over whether the Big Ten will have four automatic qualifiers in any future playoff format, a source told The Times. With nine conference games already built into the schedule and the possibility of an annual crossover matchup with the Southeastern Conference still on their radar, USC officials see no reason to commit long term to the Notre Dame matchup without assurances they wouldn’t be punished for scheduling such a marquee nonconference matchup.
The demands of Big Ten travel have also been a part of the conversation at USC, to the point officials broached the potential with Notre Dame of moving the game to the first month of the season. The hope was to better balance its future slate of travel to the Midwest and East Coast. Last season, in their Big Ten debut, the Trojans lost all four of their Big Ten road trips.
But Notre Dame was not receptive to the idea of moving the game, which traditionally has been played in the latter half of the football season.
The Irish agreed earlier this month to a 12-year home-and-home scheduling agreement with Clemson. But while that deal seemed like a precursor to moving on from the USC series, Sports Illustrated reported this week that it was not expected to stand in the way of continuing with the Trojans.
Uncertainty has loomed over the rivalry since last summer when USC coach Lincoln Riley was first asked about its future at Big Ten media days.
Riley said at the time that he hoped to continue the series, but hinted pretty strongly at the possibility that USC could drop the game if it would better position the team to win a national title
“I know it means a lot to a lot of people,” Riley said. “The purist in you [says] no doubt. Now if you get in a position where you got to make a decision on what’s best for SC to help us win a national championship vs. keep that [game], shoot, then you got to look at it.
“And listen, we’re not the first example of that. Look all the way across the country. There have been a lot of other teams sacrificing rivalry games. And I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen. But as we get into this playoff structure, and if it changes or not, we’re in this new conference, we’re going to learn something about this as we go and what the right and the best track is to winning a national championship, that’s going to evolve.”
Those comments led many to point fingers at Riley for laying the groundwork for the rivalry’s possible demise. But as the two sides now stand at an impasse, a person familiar with the discussion at USC insisted that any decision on the series and its future would come from athletic director Jennifer Cohen.
She’ll have plenty to weigh on that front in the coming months, with both schools likely to dig in their heels for the long haul, slinging mud at one another in the meantime.
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