If you need another reason to cheer against Notre Dame in Saturday night’s big game against BYU, then pull up a chair. As my mother (never) said, if you haven’t got something nice to say about someone, come sit next to me.
Notre Dame is unbeaten in five (easy) games and ranked No. 2 in the country. Win or lose against BYU, the Irish seem destined to qualify for the College Football Playoff because the whole arrangement is slanted in their favor. College football has awarded Notre Dame a discount pass to the playoffs that all but allows them to go to the front of the line and bypass the crowd.
Why?
A little background is necessary.
Notre Dame has been college football’s favorite child since rumble seats, fedoras and Calvin Coolidge. The Irish have been coddled and accommodated, largely based on a reputation that is a long way in the rearview mirror. The Notre Dame Era has been over for decades, but the powers-that-be haven’t noticed and still keep treating them as if Knute Rockne were still in charge (not that they ever should have given them preferential treatment in the first place).
Beginning a hundred years ago, Notre Dame built a following that somehow still endures. The Irish were Rockne, win-one-for-the Gipper, Rudy, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Johnny Lujack, Paul Hornung, the Joes (Montana and Theismann), seven Heisman winners, 11 national championships. It began in the ’20s — the NINETEEN-twenties — and the lore of the Irish became such that Hollywood made movies about them.
In the ’20s and ’30s, Rockne, the legendary coach and marketing genius, took Notre Dame’s football team on national train tours, playing games in every region of the country. He made them media events. He created a traveling press box on the train and invited the most famous writers in the country to travel with them, giving them first-class accommodations. He held practices that were staged events for local media at each stop. He utilized newsreel cameras at every train depot, the film being shown later in movie theaters around the nation.
The Irish were a traveling football circus and Rockne was ringmaster. They won a huge national following, especially among the nation’s millions of Catholics. They also won national championships in the 1920s (two), ’30s (one), ’40s (four), ’60s (one), ’70s (two) and ’80s (one).
Few would argue it was ever fair, but Notre Dame was given preferential treatment and it set a precedent that endures. There are rules for the Irish and rules for everybody else. Nobody has benefited more from the crazy, nonsensical system of deciding national championships over the decades than Notre Dame.
A Notre Dame exception was written into the rules of the Bowl Coalition (1992-94) and the Bowl Alliance (1995-97), consisting of special provisions — a prescribed ranking and number of wins — that created a clear (easier) path to one of the major bowls used to determine national champions.
Under the rules of the old Bowl Championships Series, or BCS (1998-2013), the precursor to the current playoff system, there was a special stipulation that awarded an automatic BCS bowl bid to Notre Dame if the Irish finished in the top eight of the final BCS standings. No other school was granted such a stipulation.
In the spring of 2025, another special provision — the so-called Memorandum of Understanding — was created for Notre Dame, effective in 2026. It stipulates that all Notre Dame has to do to automatically qualify for the national playoff is finish among the top 12 of the final rankings. All other teams can qualify only by winning one of the four power conference championships (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC), or claim the highest ranking among the Group of Five (the non-Power Four conferences). There are also six at-large berths that will be awarded using factors such as strength of schedule, head-to-head results, etc.
Unlike other schools, the Irish don’t belong to a conference, which means they don’t have to survive a conference schedule or a conference championship game. This arrangement is not only acceptable to the CFP, it is accommodated.
The Irish can create their own schedule — so far this season they have played 4-1 Wisconsin, 1-5 Rice, 2-4 Michigan State, 3-3 Purdue, 3-2 North Carolina, 2-4 Stanford, outscoring their opponents by a combined score of 272-66, an average of 33 points per game. The Irish have won 16 straight games by double digits going back to last season, and the 2024 team played in the national championship game, losing to Ohio State.
It’s a nice arrangement if you can get it.
Notre Dame is still living on its past glory and the powers-that-be are too. The Irish haven’t won a national championship since 1988.
The irony is that when the Irish — without the benefit of the “Memorandum of Understanding” — were not granted a spot in last year’s national playoff, they threw a fit and refused to play in any bowl game (it had been arranged for them to play BYU).
Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua had the audacity to say, “We feel like the (2025) playoff was stolen from our student-athletes.”
After all the favoritism and special accommodations that had been made for Notre Dame, he actually called the rankings “a farce and total waste of time.”
He’s right about that, but largely because the system benefits Notre Dame and has for years.
On Saturday, the Irish will play BYU in a game that should have been played 10 months ago.
