The Notre Dame football program is still sifting through the rubble after their surprising exclusion from the 2025 college football playoff field in favor of the Miami Hurricanes. Miami vindicated the committee’s decision with a road win over Texas A&M over the weekend, but that still isn’t going to take the sting out of the snub for the Fighting Irish anytime soon.
Now, in order to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, the Notre Dame brass is being proactive about adding to their future strength of schedule.
“News: Notre Dame has announced a home-and-home with BYU. Provo in 2026, South Bend in 2027. Dates to be announced later,” reported college football insider Nicole Auerbach of NBC Sports on X, formerly Twitter.
Auerbach also confirmed what this likely meant for one of Notre Dame’s most storied rivalries.
“This all but guarantees no Notre Dame-USC game in 2026. To recap: USC wants to play the game before Big Ten play, ND wants to play it later in the season,” she reported.
“Notre Dame first played USC in 1926, and the game has been played almost every year since (except during World War II and in 2020),” she added.
Overall, BYU was also a team that felt they were snubbed from the college football playoff field this year, having lost just twice all season, both times to Texas Tech in blowout fashion.
While fans will miss seeing Notre Dame take on their friends from Southern California next fall, the hope is that a game against BYU will be more of a resume booster, at least in the eyes of the college football playoff committee.
In any case, the Notre Dame football program’s attention is now fully on next season and beyond, as the team declined its invitation to a bowl game, seemingly as a protest to the committee’s decision to exclude them.
