With the end of the contract between USC and Notre Dame and one of the most expensive football competitions in the college at a high threat of the end, officials at the University of Southern California expanded a presentation to Notre Dame earlier this month in the hope of continuing the historical series for at least one season – during the fall of 2026 – a person familiar with the negotiations that were not composed of the public in TIMS.
The future of competition after that, in the eyes of USC leaders, depends in a large part of what is happening with the form of a football team in the college – that is, the number of automatic qualifications guaranteed to Big Ten in future stadiums. Until these questions are answered, USC leaders agree on the best path forward for his rivalry, which dates back to a century with Notre Dame is to continue their arrangement in one season at a time.
A USC source said that anything else will be “a bad decision strategically.”
This schedule is the place where the competitors find themselves in trouble. Notradam seeks to a long -term extension of the series, and in an interview with SPORTS Illustrated earlier this week, the Irish sports director Beit Bevakua did not suggest that USC endangered the competition.
“I think South Cal and Nutrdam should play every year as long as university football is played,” He told Si’s Pat Forde“SC knows that this is what we feel.”
The Blueblood programs have played 95 times since 1924, when the story says that the wife of the legendary Nuutedam coach Knute Rockne has persuaded her husband to schedule the series so that she could visit southern California every year. In the century since then, the Second World War and the Covid-19 epidemic stood on the USC and Notre Dame Road at the football field. Between them, the competitors excel over 16 national titles, more than any other teams playing an annual football series.
They are scheduled to meet again in October in South Bend. What happens to the historical series after this match may decrease to those who are ill in a high -risk chicken game between the two schools.
A source told the Times that USC has no plans to budge on its site without clarity on whether Big Ten has four automatic qualifications in any decisive format in the future. With nine conference games that were already created in the schedule and the possibility of an annual intersection match with the Southeast Conference still on their radar, USC officials do not see any reason for the long -term commitment to the Notre Dame match without assurance that they will not be punished for schedule such an unrestricted match.
The Big Ten Travel demands were also part of the conversation at the University of Southern California, to the point whose officials have taken to the possibility of transferring the match to the first month of the season. Hope was the balance between the future travel list to the Middle East and the East Coast. Last season, in their appearance Big Ten for the first time, the Trojan horses lost all their four trips on the roads.
But Notre Dame was not accepted for the idea of moving the game, which was traditionally played in the last half of the football season.
The Irish earlier this month agreed to the 12 -year -old home and house scheduling agreement with Clemeson. But while this deal seemed to serve as an introduction to the transfer from the USC series, the SPORTS Illustrated this week stated that it is not expected to stand on the way to continue with the Trojan horses.
He waved uncertainty for competition since last summer when USC Lincoln Riley coach He was asked for the first time about her future in Big Tin days.
Riley said at the time that he hopes to continue the seriesBut hint strongly to the possibility that USC can drop the game if it is better for the team to win a national title
“I know this means many for many people,” said Riley. “The carrier in you [says] There is no doubt. Now if you get a position where I got a decision on what is better for SC to help us win a national championship in exchange for maintaining this [game]Shot, then you have to look at it.
“Listen, we are not the first example of this. Look all the way throughout the country. There were many other teams that sacrifice competition games. I do not say that this will happen. But with our entry into this Play of the Playoff, and if it changed or not, we are in this new conference, we will learn something about this as we go and what is the right of the path that it wins, so winning it.”
These comments led many to Riley fingers to lay the foundation for the demise of potential competition. But when the two sides now stand in trouble, the person familiar with the discussion in USC insisted that any decision on the series and its future will come from Sports director Jennifer Cohen.
It will have a lot to install it on this front in the coming months, as both schools are probably digging in their pursuit for a long time, and the confusion of clay in each other in the meantime.
