The Notre Dame-USC rivalry is taking a break.
The two schools won’t play each other in 2026 after failing to agree on a game date, and Notre Dame is instead scheduling a two-year series with BYU starting next season, according to Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger.
It’s a stunning development for one of college football’s most historic rivalries. The series started in 1926 and has been played every year since 1943, except for the COVID-affected 2020 season. That’s 78 straight years, and now it’s stopping because neither side could figure out when to play.
“USC and Notre Dame recognize how special our rivalry is to our fans, our teams, and college football, and our institutions will continue working towards bringing back The Battle for the Jeweled Shillelagh,” the universities said in a joint statement. “The rivalry between our two schools is one of the best in all of sport, and we look forward to meeting again in the future.”
The issue came down to College Football Playoff implications. USC wanted to move the game from its traditional late-November slot — worried about how the selection committee treats late-season losses — but the schools couldn’t agree on an alternative date, according to Dellenger. They discussed Week Zero, but couldn’t make it work.
USC athletic director Jen Cohen and Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua have reportedly agreed to try restarting the series in 2030, but that’s four years away and far from guaranteed.
This has been brewing for a while. Back in September, USC worked with Netflix on a proposal to move the rivalry game to a neutral site in Las Vegas or Mexico City to get around the Big Ten and NBC’s existing TV rights deals, which would’ve let the schools sell the game directly to the streamer. The Big Ten shut it down immediately after the networks involved went ballistic over USC trying to undermine deals worth hundreds of millions annually.
By October, the Los Angeles Times reported talks between Netflix and USC were still ongoing despite the pushback.
The possibility of ending the rivalry drew sharp criticism from former USC captain Petros Papadakis, who now works as an analyst for Fox Sports. In a May appearance on 750 The Game in Portland, Papadakis unloaded on Lincoln Riley for even considering it, calling the idea “the dumbest thing I’ve heard in my life” and arguing the rivalry “transcends conference realignment” and should “survive the selfishness and the absolute myopic nature of the era we live in.” He also ripped Colin Cowherd — who’d argued on his Fox Sports Radio show that USC should dump the Notre Dame game given how hard the Big Ten schedule already is — for “carrying water” for Riley.
Notre Dame will play BYU in Provo in October 2026, then host the Cougars in South Bend in 2027, per Yahoo Sports. The Irish replacing USC with the same team they refused to play in a bowl game two weeks ago is the perfect encapsulation of how broken college football scheduling has become.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.