Back in the good old days, like last year, you could call up almost any administrator in the SEC or Big Ten, ask them about Notre Dame's scheduling problems in the current era of college football and get a reliable answer.
"Join a bleeping conference! (Preferably ours.)"
Well, that argument is over. By agreeing to the 24-team College Football Playoff last week, the SEC and Big Ten have all but ensured that Notre Dame's independence is structurally embedded in the fabric of the sport. As colleague Ross Dellenger outlined Thursday in a piece about Miami's future, programs that are attractive enough to command a lucrative TV deal with one of the big streaming companies don't really need a conference for football anymore. If anything, we might see more traditional powers try to go independent now that the bar for postseason access has been significantly lowered.
So now Notre Dame has a choice: Does it want to do what's best for the sport, or does it want to create the easiest possible path to the playoff?
Because here's the difference between a playoff with 12 and 24 teams: Right now, Notre Dame is on the ropes because of its Charmin-quality schedule. After losing to BYU, the Irish have one more chance to get a great win (vs. Miami on Nov. 7) and one more chance to get a pretty good win (vs. SMU on Nov. 21). If Notre Dame doesn't beat the Hurricanes, it's hard to see how a 10-2 record of assorted flotsam and jetsam will be good enough to get in. It could very well be a repeat of last season when the Irish lost its two early big games to Miami and Texas A&M, had one semi-consequential win over USC and got snubbed for the last spot in favor of the Hurricanes team that beat them head-to-head.
Next year, though? All this hand-wringing would be a non-issue. Through sheer schedule manipulation, Notre Dame could ensure itself a bid every season barring some kind of injury meltdown.
So why would the Irish do anything different?
To be fair, Notre Dame did not intend for its 2026 schedule to be this weak. When they scheduled a series with Wisconsin back in 2017, the Badgers were annual contenders in the Big Ten. It wasn't completely or even mostly their fault that USC put a pause on a rivalry that had been played every year since 1946 aside from the COVID season in 2020. It would have been hard to anticipate the depths to which Michigan State, Purdue and Stanford have fallen.
When North Carolina is your third- or fourth-most difficult game, we don't need to sugarcoat how underwhelming the Irish's schedule turned out to be. That's what was so refreshing about the BYU game: At least it gave fans of other teams reason to watch.
And that's the danger of being in charge of your own schedule in the 24-team era. For all the talk about how expanded playoff access will motivate administrators to schedule more big, blockbuster matchups, the evidence so far simply hasn't supported it. Since going to 12 teams, the number of attractive nonconference games has gotten smaller every year. With nearly every coach in the SEC bellyaching about how much tougher the nine-game conference schedule has made their lives, can we really expect teams to add even more challenging games when there's so little incentive to do so?
Think about it this way. At the moment, you'd rather be Georgia than Notre Dame with regard to the CFP. With a win over Alabama under its belt and games coming up against Florida, Ole Miss and Missouri, even a 10-2 Georgia team would have better overall résumé than an 11-1 Notre Dame. But if it were next year's playoff format, we would already know both are easily getting in. And in that case, would you be in better position for the playoff coming off a physically punishing SEC schedule like Georgia's or taking the Notre Dame route of least resistance?
There's a good chance we may have that exact debate next season. As of now, Notre Dame's 2027 schedule includes a home game with BYU but nobody else that is guaranteed to be part of the national conversation. If Auburn, Clemson, Virginia Tech, Duke and Virginia are significantly better next year, Notre Dame's schedule might look OK. If not, the Irish will cruise to the CFP without having to do much of anything.
In 2028 and 2029, Notre Dame has a home-and-home with Texas on the books, as well as an Alabama series in 2029-30. There's also a 12-year agreement with Clemson starting next year, though the attractiveness of that series will largely depend on whether Dabo Swinney can ever get his program back into contention in the NIL/transfer portal era. Pete Bevacqua, the Notre Dame athletic director and former television executive, has made noise about trying to schedule some more high-profile opponents from the Big Ten and SEC.
But it takes two to tango, and if any kind of formal scheduling agreement takes shape between the Big Ten and SEC as some of their principals are currently discussing, where is Notre Dame going to get those games from? Few programs are going to want to play nine conference games, a Big Ten-SEC crossover game and Notre Dame unless there's some major incentive that isn't tied to playoff participation.
So how does any of that happen unless Notre Dame can extract itself from the ACC scheduling agreement (which runs well into the 2030s) and get something else done with either or both of those other leagues. And of course, if Notre Dame were to sever its relationship with the ACC, it would almost certainly need to find another home for its basketball programs and Olympic sports.
These are first-world problems, though. When the CFP began in 2014 as a four-team tournament, Notre Dame had an uphill battle to find the sweet spot of playing enough legitimate games to get credibility with the committee but not so many that it would put itself at risk.
Of all the things Brian Kelly accomplished in 12 years as Notre Dame's coach, the significance of jumping over multiple conference champions to get into the CFP in 2018 cannot be understated. Because even though Notre Dame has never wavered on its desire for independence, there were certainly internal conversations happening at that time about the sustainability of their model.
Getting to the CFP once, then doing it again in 2020, showed what was still possible as an independent. Then when the 12-team format came into being — designed in part by former AD Jack Swarbrick — Notre Dame's interests were protected for the foreseeable future. Even as recently as a year ago, when it became clear the Irish might have some issues getting into the CFP with its lack of big wins, you'd occasionally hear someone from the Big Ten or SEC muse about the inevitability of Notre Dame joining one of their leagues.
You don't hear that anymore.
With the complexity of putting together an independent schedule and the difficulty of projecting how good teams are going to be from one year to the next, much less half a decade down the road, you can't be too critical of what the Irish ended up with this year. They will either win the Miami game on Nov. 7 and likely get in, or lose the Miami game and be on track to get left out again. There's not much coach Marcus Freeman or his players can do about how few big win opportunities came their way.
But at the very moment it's becoming clear Notre Dame should beef up its schedule, here comes a new playoff format that will not require or incentivize it in any way.
Which way will they go — toward an SEC model where it's week after week of brutal, must-see matchups, or retreat to the comfort of an ACC-laden vacation until it's time to wake up for the CFP?
Notre Dame's long-term independence and postseason access is now secure. But its scheduling approach will tell us all we need to know about how they plan to use it.