SOUTH BEND, Ind. \u2014 The Notre Dame-USC football series is coming back.<\/p>\n
After a multiyear hiatus and several rounds of back-and-forth negotiations between the athletic departments, a series that dates back to the days of Knute Rockne and defined a generation of college football will return. The schools announced Monday that they agreed to a four-year deal, starting in Week 1 of 2030. The return of the series was made possible in part by Indiana\u2019s impending decision to back out of its home-and-home series with Notre Dame, scheduled for 2030 and 2031, according to a source briefed on Notre Dame scheduling who spoke on condition of anonymity before the cancellation was official.<\/p>\n
USC got its wish to play the game earlier in the season: The series will return on Aug. 31, 2030, in Los Angeles, and then Notre Dame will host in Week 1 on Aug. 30, 2031.<\/p>\n
\u201cUSC\u2019s historic rivalry with Notre Dame holds a special place in the history of college football, and we are happy to resume a series that means so much to the entire Trojan Family,\u201d USC athletic director Jen Cohen said in a statement. \u201cIt remains important for us to play this game early in the season, as it allows us to schedule competitively with our Big Ten peers and takes into account the health and best interests of our student-athletes and program.\u201d<\/p>\n
The return of the USC series early in the season will front-load Notre Dame\u2019s 2030 schedule. Two weeks after opening against the Trojans, the Irish will head to Tuscaloosa to play Alabama. It was a compromise Notre Dame was willing to make after USC balked at the idea of more midseason cross-country travel on top of its Big Ten slate. This season, the Trojans have road games at Rutgers, Penn State, Indiana and Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
What college rivalry should come back?<\/p>\n
Joe Rexrode, Eric Single and more<\/p>\n
The Notre Dame-USC series began in 1926 and had been played every season since, except for three years off during World War II and a one-year break in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That\u2019s what made the breakdown of negotiations the series\u2019 extension beyond 2025 so difficult to accept around college football. Instead of traveling to Los Angeles on Thanksgiving weekend, Notre Dame will play at Syracuse to cap its 2026 schedule.<\/p>\n
Notre Dame and USC failed to agree on a new deal to extend the series in the wake of multiple public comments from USC leaders about the difficulty of making the College Football Playoff in a world of super-sized power conferences.<\/p>\n
Trojans head coach Lincoln Riley was the first to sound the alarm about the Notre Dame-USC series two years ago, at Big Ten media days in Indianapolis, when he floated the idea of nixing games with Notre Dame.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would love to (to keep playing),\u201d Riley said. \u201cI know it means a lot to a lot of people. The purist in you, no doubt. Now if you get in a position where you got to make a decision on what\u2019s best for SC to help us win a national championship versus keeping that, shoot, then you got to look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n
So began two years of tension and uncertainty between the schools as their contract ran out, including USC suggesting the game be moved to Week 0 and floating the idea of playing it in Mexico City. Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman was drawn into the public negotiations, which at times felt more like posturing between the schools than good-faith discussions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to go and go play anytime, anywhere, but at the same token it\u2019s important that I make decisions too that are best for the program,\u201d Freeman said last summer. \u201cTo move a game that we were pretty sure was going to be Week 12 to Week 0 isn\u2019t what\u2019s best for our program.\u201d<\/p>\n
The series formally fell apart last December when the schools failed to reach an extension. Notre Dame added a two-game series with BYU to help fill the hole in its schedule, traveling to Provo this season and hosting the Cougars in 2027.<\/p>\n
Notre Dame\u2019s quick replacement for USC suggested the Irish needed the series more than the Trojans, who have yet to find their footing in the Big Ten, going 11-7 the past two seasons. USC, which kicked off the Pac-12\u2019s dissolution by jumping with UCLA for the Big Ten, never qualified for the four-team CFP and has yet to challenge for the 12-team field. The Trojans won\u2019t face a Power 4 opponent in nonconference play this season, but their Big Ten schedule includes trips to defending national champion Indiana on Nov. 14 and to Penn State on Oct. 10. They also host Ohio State and Oregon at the Coliseum.<\/p>\n
The Irish faced just eight Power 4 programs during Notre Dame\u2019s run to the College Football Playoff two years ago. Last season, the Irish played only four teams that finished in the AP Top 25, and they were unable to overcome back-to-back losses to Miami and Texas A&M to open the season. Notre Dame\u2019s schedule this season might be weaker, with the Irish not facing a team that finished last season with a winning record until that Oct. 17 trip to BYU.<\/p>\n
Both schools had been relatively quiet about the status of the series ever since Riley blamed Notre Dame for the series going on a break before USC\u2019s loss in the Alamo Bowl.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe took Notre Dame at their word that they would play us anytime and anywhere,\u201d Riley said. \u201cThat proposal was rejected. Not only was it rejected, five minutes after we got the call, it was announced that they had scheduled another opponent, which, I\u2019ll give them credit. That might be the fastest scheduling act in college football history.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Big Ten media days last week, Riley stood by those comments.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing has changed from my vantage point,\u201d Riley said. \u201cWe want to play the game. I want to play the game. We would be playing the game had some things come true that were said. \u2026 Hopefully I\u2019m up here next year talking about that game on the future schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n
Notre Dame\u2019s last public comment on the series came at ACC meetings in Amelia Island, Fla., when athletic director Pete Bevacqua reiterated the Irish\u2019s stance that the series needed to be restarted and sounded reluctant to be dragged into another round of finger pointing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think any \u2018anywhere, anytime\u2019 can be taken out of context,\u201d Bevacqua said in late July. \u201cLike, we\u2019re not going to play them tomorrow afternoon, right? So what Marcus meant and what I meant is, listen, we\u2019ll be flexible. We\u2019ll move things around. We\u2019ll create space. We\u2019ll move games.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, after two years of talking about the importance of the Notre Dame-USC series, space has been created, and a beloved college football game is back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SOUTH BEND, Ind. \u2014 The Notre Dame-USC football series is coming back. After a multiyear hiatus and several…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":978253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[43],"tags":[1428,1318,1317,1315,1316,13874,62,67,132,68,9446],"class_list":["post-978252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-notre-dame-fighting-irish","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-usc-trojans"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117032694117378794","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/978253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}