UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Scheduling is becoming much tougher for ND. The notion that top 25 teams are dying to play us is simplistic. How many top 25 teams are we playing in 2026? To save you from having to make something else up, I'll tell you that the current published schedule of 10 teams has maybe one which might be Miami and that is only because of our ACC schedule. And finding teams to fill out the 2026 schedule is tough and is only going to get tougher.

The ACC and the BIG are moving to more conference games which thins the available field for us. The top teams will have plenty of opportunity to play enough quality teams in conference so as not to have to schedule more than one OOC team. And SEC/ Big 12 teams don't want to play ND in "ND weather" hence making the back end of our schedule a shit show of teams from the crappy ACC + Navy and leaves us little chance to impress the committee when that is exactly what the conferences are doing.

The USC/ND game is in jeopardy because USC wants to play the game earlier, prior to their conference schedule. This is true with virtually everyone we play outside of the ACC opponents. And this is the key reason why we started the season with Miami and Texas A&M while other teams in the top 15 only schedule one "top team" prior to their conference schedule.